FOSSIL IVORY

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 300, 13 May 1911, Page 9

FOSSIL IVORY

Siberia furnishes a large quantity of ivory to the -markets of the world, but tlie production of it belongs to another age and to a species of animal that does not now exist. The ivory is cut from the tusks of mastodons whose skeletons are found frozen in masses of ice or buried in the mud of Siberian rivers and swamps. The northern portion of the country abounds in extensive hogs which are called urnians. In these are found the tusks of the mastodon, from which it is inferred that these animals lost their lives by venturing upon a surface that would not bear their weight. Kven to wild animals these urmnns are forbidden ground. The nimble reindeer can sometimes cross them safely in summer time, but most .other large animals attempting to do so would be engulfed. I In the museum at Tobolsk are numerous specimens of mammoth, and throughout this region they are by no means rare. When an ice pack breaks down a river bank or the summer thaw penetrates more deeply than usual into the ground, some of these antediluvian monsters are very likely to be exposed. In many cases, says "Harper's Weekly," their remains are so fresh and well preserved, with their dark shaggy hair and under wool of reddish brown, their tufted ears and long, curved tusks, that all the aborigines, and even some of the Russian settlers, persist in their belief that they are specimens of animals which still live, burrowing underground like moles, and die the instant they are admitted to the light. The further the traveller goes northward, it is said, the more abundant do these remains become. They are washed up with the tides upon the Arctic shores, and, some extensive islands off the coast contain great quantities of fossil ivory and bones.

Tusks which have been long or repeatedly exposed to the air are brittle and unserviceable, but those which have remained buried in the ice retain the qualities of recent ivory and are a valuable article of merchandise. There is a great market for these mammoth tusks at Yakutsk, on the Lena, whence they find their way into the workshops of European Russia and to the ivory carvers of Canton.