A Little About the Errors of Scholars

A little about the errors of scholars. In 1806 a frozen mammoth was found in the valley of the River Lena. Apart from the missing internal organs, part of the muscle mass and the front right leg, it was a whole carcass, badly mauled by the wild beasts that had come upon it first. The hunter Shumakov, who discovered the mammoth, sold the tusks to bone traders; the rest fell to the scholars: Mikhail Adams dug up the remains and delivered them to Saint Petersburg. He describes the mammoth's very heavy hide and abundant hair, all of which had yet to be separated from the skeleton. Adams later managed to buy the tusks back, though he could only suppose that they were the very ones that had belonged to his exhibit. In Petersburg the skeleton was set up in the Kunstkamera, the project being directed by the German naturalist Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau. He was neither a palaeontologist nor a zoologist and could go only by the skeleton of an elephant, also on display in the museum. No wonder the German made a mistake and mounted the tusks wrongly: on his model they pointed outwards. At that time the exact placement of a mammoth's tusks had still not been established, which is quite understandable, given that this was the first fully reconstructed mammoth skeleton. Much later, scholars determined that mammoth tusks curved precisely inwards, unlike those of elephants, for instance. Thus for 100 years!!! first in the Kunstkamera, and then in the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences, there stood a wrongly assembled mammoth. Fortunately, in 1899 justice was at last done, and Adams's mammoth, or the Lena mammoth as it is also called, now threatens the world with its tusks at the correct angle.