Mammoth fauna, Yakutia, Russia
Mammoth tusk
Mammuthus primigenius
Almost black bone with a cold sheen — the permafrost gave it its colour.
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- Epoch
- Pleistocene
- Age
- 10–40 thousand years
- Origin
- Yakutia, Russia
- Size
- 42 cm
- Classification
- Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)
- Habitat
- The mammoth steppe of Yakutia
- Ref.
- R–0311
In this specimen, colour is paramount: almost black dentine with a cool sheen makes the 42 cm arc visually austere and distinctly contemporary. A mammoth tusk is a modified incisor, and here it reads not as a fragment of bone, but as a dense natural material with the depth that only time can give.
The colour of the tusk comes not from the material but from the ground: over thousands of years the minerals of the permafrost impregnated the dentine and carried it towards an almost black tone with a bluish-grey sheen. The surface is dense and glossy, the curve even along its whole length.
In life
The woolly mammoth of glacial Yakutia. Beneath the dense coat lay a layer of fat a palm thick; thus it withstood the frost from which every living thing hides today.