Mammoth

First lines

About this book

No fabled creature of the Pleistocene Era has a more powerful hold on the imagination than does the woolly mammoth. Cave paintings of the giant beasts hint at the profound role they played in early human culture. Our Ice Age ancestors built igloo-shaped huts out of mammoth bones and even feasted on mammoth tongues. Eager to uncover more clues to this mystical prehistoric age, explorers since the time of Peter the Great have scoured Siberia for mammoth remains. Now a new generation of explorers has taken to the tundra. Armed with GPS, ground-penetrating radar, and Soviet-era military helicopters, they seek an elusive prize: a mammoth carcass that will help determine how the creature lived, how it died, and how it might be brought back to life. Science writer Richard Stone follows two teams of explorers -- one Russian/Japanese, the other a French-led consortium -- as they battle bitter cold, high winds, supply shortages, and the deeply rooted superstitions of indigenous peoples who fear the consequences of awakening the "rat beneath the ice." Stone travels from St. Petersburg to the Arctic Circle, from the North Sea to high-tech Japanese laboratories, as he traces the sometimes-surreal quest of these intrepid scientists, whose work could well rewrite our planet's evolutionary history. - Publisher.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Richard Stone

1966

Richard Stone is the European News Editor of Science magazine. He has written for Discover, the Washington Post, the Moscow Times, Smithsonian, and numerous other publications. A graduate of Cornell University and a Fulbright scholar in Russia, Stone won the Evert Clark Award for science journalism in 1995 for a Discover article and a Walter Sullivan Award in 2001 for an article in Smithsonian magazine. -Hachette