Mammoth Baller

wind2000 · Sep 20, 2007

DMITRY SOLOVYOV

Reuters and staff

September 19, 2007

CHERSKY, RUSSIA -- One day, climate change could cost the Earth. For now, it is a financial bonus for Alexander Vatagin.

In Siberia's northernmost reaches, high up in the Arctic Circle, the changing temperature is thawing out the permafrost to reveal the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoths, woolly rhinos and lions that have been buried for thousands of years.

Private collectors and scientific institutes will pay huge sums for the right specimen, and bone prospectors like Mr. Vatagin have turned this region, eight time zones from Moscow, into a paleontological Klondike.

"Last year, someone was paid 800,000 rubles [$32,300 Canadian] for a mammoth head with two tusks in great condition," Mr. Vatagin said.

A brawny 45-year-old, he has a network of helpers: the fishermen and reindeer-herders of the Yukagir ethnic group.

Prehistoric bones are not very hard to find. The permafrost is thawing and breaking up so rapidly that in certain places in the tundra, every few metres bones poke out through the soil. Some just lie on the surface.

Mr. Vatagin pays between $8 and $160 per kilogram of mammoth bones. But it takes a keen eye and local knowledge to find the really valuable stuff.

Tusks, sometimes curled round almost into a circle and reaching up to five metres in length, are the most prized finds. A pair of good tusks is a rarity; two tusks and a well-preserved skull can be worth a fortune.

"If he is lucky, a local can earn 200,000 rubles [$8,000] in just one day," said Mr. Vatagin, who wears a massive silver ring with a mammoth's head engraved into it. "To earn this money, he would have otherwise have to toil for a year."

Many of the bones end up at the Ice Age Museum in Moscow. The museum makes no secret that scientific discovery goes hand-in-glove with business interests.

Museum official Alexander Svalov has on one of his fingers a ring identical to the one won worn by Mr. Vatagin in distant Chersky.

The ring is the symbol of the National Alliance, a close-knit business run by entrepreneur Fyodor Shidlovsky. The company runs the museum and holds government licences allowing it to excavate and export prehistoric relics.

But there has been no such plundering of the Canadian permafrost, say officials.

Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the government of Yukon, the prime geographical area for such finds in Canada's North, says: "Yukon has legislation that protects all archeological remains, so if there's a fossil found in Yukon on Crown land it's the property of the government." If remains are found on first-nations settlements or land-claims areas, they remain native property.

He also credits the placer gold-mining industry with being "incredibly good" at donating any fossils it finds.

"It's fairly well entrenched in the public conscience here that if things are found it's better that they remain public," he said.

Back in Chersky, Sergei Davydov, a 52-year-old scientist, does not sell the bones he collects. He keeps them to study the effects of climate change, but also because they fascinate him.

Mr. Davydov acknowledges that rising temperatures in Siberia have been a boon for bone collectors. But then he reflects: "From the point of view of humanity, it would have been better if this had never happened," he said.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070919.A2BONES19/TPStory/TPInternational/Europe/

Damn, i wish Canadian land would have bones for me to dig up and make fast legal cash -shock

Mammoth Baller

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