Science: Young Visitor

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The mammoth was a baby perhaps only a few days old. It was still bald, like its relatives, the modern elephants, rather than hairy like its own parents. It stood about 3 ft. high and weighed more than 200 lbs. One day, some 15,000 years ago, something happened to the baby mammoth. It may have stumbled into a bog or into quicksand, and been unable to get out. Perhaps the bank of a prehistoric river caved in on it. It sank down into the cold, Pleistocene mud, which kept out the air and preserved the body. With the coming of winter, the mammoth was frozen solid; the river kept on dropping silt. Moss and peat kept the body insulated.

Last fall the Fairbanks Exploration Co., mining for gold in Alaska, washed the body out of its deep-freeze burial place; the parts that were found, still frozen, had changed little through the centuries. As the skin and flesh began to thaw, workmen embalmed them with formaldehyde, glycerin and alum. They were flown to Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History and quickly refrozen.

Last week the museum put the mammoth's remains on display. The trunk, left front leg and part of the head were stuffed into an ordinary 8-cu.-ft. home freezer. Although the Russians have found whole mammoths in Siberia, these were the first frozen parts of a mammoth to be exhibited in the U.S.

Finding of the well-preserved pieces of mammoth encourages scientists to hope that they will some day find the deep-frozen body of a prehistoric man. But prehistoric men were smarter than the mammoths they hunted, and maybe fewer of them fell into freezing bogs.