The view inside the vintage Aeroflot helicopter skimming across the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia is clouded by cigarette haze, but outside all is clear in the subzero air. Treeless hills cast bluish shadows, and ice-packed rivers snake through the frozen tundra, glittering in the late afternoon sun like golden blasts of dragon fire. A herd of shaggy reindeer below, startled by the insistent whop-whop-whop, sprint past larch trees of the Ary Mas reserve, the northernmost forest in the world. As the helicopter banks, a cluster of tents appears on the horizon. A half-dozen people seem frozen by the sight of the orange-and-blue flying machine.
Members of this expedition, led by veteran Arctic explorerBernard Buigues, have been wondering if they would ever see this bird again. It had dropped them off at the barren site two days earlier, with supplies for a single night's stay. Because the satellite phone had failed, they had no way of knowing the helicopter had been diverted to carry mechanics and parts to a remote village for the emergency repair of an electric generator. After 24 hours of hunger and uncertainty, buffeted by 25-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero, everyone seems eager to break camp. Everyone except Buigues.
He smiles at his rescuers, eager to show off. "Come, follow me," he insists. Without bothering to cover his balding head with a fur-lined parka hood, he strides past the tents and down a steep bank to a frozen stream where gusts whip new snow into curlicues. As Buigues slows, the source of his excitement becomes more obvious: The tops of five chestnut-colored spinal vertebrae jut out of the ground like the back of an old sea serpent. They are the ancient remains of a woolly mammoth that Buigues and his colleagues have dubbed Hook. Buigues gets down on his hands and knees and points to tufts of hair. Can there be frozen flesh too? "We suppose that about half the mammoth is in the permafrost," he says, uncertain because the cold has sucked the power from the batteries in the expedition's ground-penetrating radar. The team has marked the site with a 20-foot-high pole so that they can find it again, perhaps in a few months.
If exhumed, the Hook carcass could help solve one of the great mysteries of species extinction. Countless woolly mammoths— elephantlike creatures with downward sloping hindquarters, small ears, and tusks up to 16 feet long— once roamed the dry, frigid grasslands of Siberia. But about 11,000 years ago, the entire mammoth population began to die off. Scientists have speculated that the giants were either driven to extinction by prehistoric human hunters or that they succumbed to a warm-up at the end of the Great Ice Age that blighted their food supply. Buigues and a research team that includes Ross MacPhee, curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, have come here hoping to gather DNA samples to test yet a third theory of mammoth extinction. MacPhee believes the beasts may have been the victims of an apocalyptic disease, something he calls "the killer plague of all time."
About 250 miles southwest of Taimyr Lake lies Khatanga, a town of 5,000 where houses are propped up on pilings to keep them from sinking into the permafrost. There, a former savings bank has been converted into a crude laboratory filled with animal bones. Dick Mol, an amateur paleontologist who serves as scientific coordinator for the expedition, sets a fragment of mammoth shinbone on a table. "Let's drill it," says MacPhee. He picks up an orange Black and Decker hand drill, pushes the 1/4-inch bit against the bone, and pulls the trigger. As smoke spirals up, he douses the deepening hole with water. "It's like it's on fire," says MacPhee as the room fills with the odor of hot collagen.
