Living Mammoths?

As some of you may know, I have a big interest (er...perhaps even a big obsession) in the tales and stories relative to still-living Mammoths. Nonsense? Exaggeration? Hoaxes? Or, astonishingly, the literal truth? Well, those are the big questions! There's no doubt, however, that there's a surprisingly large body of witness-testimony on surviving Mammoths. But, like the bodies from Roswell, no-one has yet delivered the goods!

I wrote a small article on this subject for my Lair of the Beasts column at Mania.com some time ago (which can be found here). But, now, Lindsay Selby has prepared a more extensive piece that makes for great reading.

Lindsay says: "There have been many tales about living Mammoths. This is in part due I am sure to the fact that some frozen specimens found look as if they died recently as they are so fresh. With scientists talking about regenerating a mammoth clone ala Jurassic Park, I thought I would dig up dome of the living mammoth stories. In the 1580's the Stroganoff family sent a band of Cossacks to hunt down a group of bandits in Siberia that had been stealing from their mines there. The leader of the expedition, Yermak Timofeyevitch, reported that beyond the Ural Mountains he met a 'large, hairy elephant.' The natives told him that the Kingdom of Sibir considered the giant animals a part of its wealth; they were valued as food and called 'mountains of meat.' In 1873 an article appeared in the Zoologist containing an interview with Cheriton Batchmatchnik, a Russian convict who escaped from Siberia who claimed to have encountered living Mammoths in a valley of the Aldan mountains."

And here's the link to the rest of Lindsay's post.