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# The World's First Monument to a Mammoth Was Erected in 1841 in the Village of Kuleshovka
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/pervyi-v-mire-pamiatnik-mamontu-ustanovili-v-1841-godu-v-sele-kuleshovka/
- Published: 2026-06-24T13:14:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:46.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Museums, Heritage, Palaeontology, Nature

The inscription on the pedestal reads:

> This extraordinary rarity was discovered in the presence of the proprietor, Chief Chamberlain Count Yu. A. Golovkin

The memorial commemorates a mammoth skeleton found on this spot in 1839\. The skeleton was dug out of a riverbank cliff on the estate of Count Yury Alexandrovich Golovkin in the Sumy region. Golovkin was an educated man, moved in scholarly circles and acted as patron of Kharkiv University, so he knew whom to notify, and he turned to his friend Professor Ivan Kalinichenko, naturalist and physician. He came in person with an expedition and dug for ten days. Groundwater prevented them from seeing the work through to the end, but two nearly complete mammoth skeletons were lifted from the pit. Carting the bones away took six wagons.

The bones were sent to the zoological cabinet of Kharkiv University, where a skeleton was assembled from them. Kalinichenko, for his part, undertook the building of a monument at the site of the find. The cast-iron obelisk stood about three metres high, and one of its faces bore a reminder that this bank had once marked the frontier between the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That is to say, besides geological antiquity, it was decided to immortalise at the same time the events of political history; it was, after all, the guileless nineteenth century.

The mammoths of Kuleshovka were among the first well-preserved finds of this kind in the Russian Empire. One of the skeletons is, in theory, supposed to be in the collection of the Kharkiv Historical Museum.