The explorer, the mammoth, and the scientists

Lyuba, Khroma and Yuka, the mammoth calves, Cherskyi the woolly rhinoceros, Jarkov and many other flora and fauna specimens and microorganisms, all bear witness to the Palaeolithic biodiversity: Mammuthus is at the source of many discoveries. Palaeontologists and zoologists from all around the world have joined the adventure.

> Their live testimony is in the Lab of mammuthus.org

Lyuba in  Salekhard laboratory, november 2008

Archives under the ice

If organisms are to survive in such an extreme environment as Siberia, they must develop unique strategies in order to adapt. At the end of the Pleistocene, around 10 000 years ago, the consequences of rising temperatures at those latitudes have triggered a great imbalance, marking the beginning of a new era: the Holocene. As many witnesses of these slow cataclysms, fossils of the Siberian Far North, once collected and documented, become essential archives in the development of Environmental Sciences.

Prehistory under a microscope

Nowadays, research based on remains from the permafrost mobilizes a vast field of knowledge and techniques, from molecular biology to comparative case studies on contemporary species. Any data inferred from these studies is used as a clue to decipher processes happening on a large time-scale, such as climatic change, an unbalanced biodiversity, evolution of entire ecosystems, adapting mechanisms of the living world…A history that is 50,000 years old, and stretches from the end of the Pleistocene to nowadays, has seen climates shift dramatically, the extinction of entire species, and the birth of humanity. It is the ideal ground to understand life on Earth.