Taiwan Today

A pale blue light reflected off the steel walls and tables in a special exhibition room at National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall in Taipei, casting an otherworldly glow on the faces of visitors seeking a glimpse of a rare natural phenomenon--the actual heads, tusks, skin and hair of ancient wooly mammoths. Inside the sealed, minus 15 degrees Celsius room lie the preserved remains of Yukagir and Oymiakon, two mammoths that were frozen for millennia in the Siberian permafrost. The two are now the stars of Mammoth Expo Taipei 2008, Taiwan's most important natural history exposition to date. Organized by museums and organizations from Taiwan, Japan and Russia to give visitors a rare glimpse at life in the ancient world, the show will run through Nov. 4. In the main lobby of the hall, families pose in front of a huge inflatable mammoth and schoolchildren gather for group pictures. Spencer Huang, events coordinator for United Daily News Group, a major sponsor and organizer of the event, pointed out that the exhibition is a family event that required great effort to bring about. "It took months and months," he said, "just to get permission to send [the frozen mammoths] to Taiwan." A large amount of paperwork had to be completed before the show could take place, as Russians consider the specimens national treasures and precious artifacts of the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation, where they were found after they emerged from the melting permafrost. Huang is pleased with the show and its impact upon local visitors. "This is a world-class exhibition," he said. "It was never about business. Our hope is to give Taiwanese more opportunities to understand artistic and natural wonders." The effort seems to be paying off, as less than two weeks after the show's opening on July 12, nearly 100,000 visitors had already attended. Yukagir, a full-grown male whose pair of curled ivory tusks thrust strikingly from one of the most complete mammoth heads ever found, is easily the most impressive part of the show. Of scientific value as well as an object of wonder, the head has provided researchers with several new areas of discovery, including evidence of a musk gland that in modern elephants causes the animals to become aggressive and violent, eventually leading a male the size of Yukagir to fight his way to the top position in the herd. Peering through the glass at the enormous remains, one wonders what challenges the great animal experienced in his lifetime. Alongside Yukagir is the front half of the body of Oymiakon, an infant female mammoth that was found in 2004. Only her head was recovered from the permafrost; the rest of the remains may have decomposed or been eaten by other animals. Whereas Yukagir is thought to have lived around 18,000 B.C., Oymiakon is much older, as scientists estimate that she lived from 28,000 B.C. to 38,000 B.C. Frozen mammoths have become increasingly popular as expo subjects around the world since 2005, when Yukagir was unveiled as the crown jewel of the Aichi Expo in Japan. Although the exhibition featured little more than the mammoth's remains, the show garnered international attention and caught the eye of Hsiang Kuo-ning, UDNG's president. For the 20th anniversary of the Chinese-language United Evening News, a UDNG newspaper, Hsiang wanted to bring a world-class event to Taiwan, one of King Kong proportions. "We remembered that the mammoth show had been a big hit in Japan," Hsiang said, "and we thought it would go over well in Taiwan." Transporting frozen mammoth remains, however, presented special challenges, and he admitted to worrying throughout the duration of Yukagir and Oymiakon's month-long trip from Yakutsk in Siberia to Taiwan. "If the cooling system failed somewhere along the way, we'd open the box to find only a pair of tusks, nothing else," Hsiang laughed. The result of Hsiang and UDNG's effort is a well-balanced show that goes much further than the original at Aichi. Mammoth Expo Taipei 2008 features several rooms of fossils, displays, videos and explanations that guide visitors on an ice-age trek. However, the setting for the show--a large hall refurbished with a temporary maze of whitewashed walls--somewhat impedes museumgoers as they move from display to display. Similarly, as the interpretive signage is all in Mandarin, international visitors may want to enlist the services of a local to act as an interpreter. A greater presence by the Sakha Republic, and more displays detailing the discovery of the finds, would also help to expand the international scope of the exhibition. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with introductions to other prehistoric members of the elephant family such as the Deinotherium, whose downward-facing tusks turned the animal into a stone-age backhoe, or the last of the mammoth line--a race of "dwarfed woolies" that grew to be only about 1.3 meters high. On loan from National Taiwan Museum, a full mammoth skeleton situated in the center of the exhibition's main hall leaves nothing between the curious observer and the animal's frame, at once alien and still strangely familiar. All told, four museums contributed to the exposition's collection of some 140 fossils and displays. To round out the exhibition, Wang Liang-jie, a private collector from Tainan in southern Taiwan, contributed fossils from a variety of ice-age species. Wang's collection features the antlers and skull of a massive extinct elk, bones from a wooly rhinoceros, as well as a range of other interesting Paleolithic curiosities. The struggle for life in the ice age comes up again and again in the exhibition, with a large portion devoted to mammoth teeth, which were some of the most developed in the animal kingdom. With ice-age climates limiting the growth of vegetation, these massive animals lived mostly on grasses, a very poor food that wears teeth down as quickly as sandpaper. In mammoths, several plates were fused together to create powerful surfaces strong enough to grind sustenance from the cold, harsh environment of the Arctic. The astonishing discovery of frozen mammoths in Siberia has captivated people for over 100 years, spawning rumors of wealthy Russians holding extinct mammoth banquets, as well as of islands in the far north where the animals still dwell. Today, however, these unique relics inspire different fantasies, those of recovering extinct DNA and someday raising the wooly mammoth from the dead. Scientists in the northeast Siberian town of Cherskii are taking this idea very seriously and have already began preparing a section of tundra for what they propose to call Pleistocene Park. By reintroducing species that are no longer found in the region, such as wild horses and bison, they hope to create the lost steppe environment in which they once thrived, then follow up by cloning mammoths to inhabit it with them. Besides allowing visitors to see a relic from another age, organizers also hope to inspire them to think about another of the exhibition's major themes--global climate change. Scientists cite this phenomenon as being responsible for melting Siberia's once frozen tundra and uncovering the mammoths. "We hope to not only satisfy people's curiosity, but also remind them of how our environment has been changing due to global warming," UDNG's Hsiang said. Looking at the remains of animals that ruled the Arctic in another time, one is forced to consider the massive extinction that accompanied the change in temperature at the end of the ice age. Today, as the permafrost continues to melt, scientists in Sakha and elsewhere have a front-row seat to the results of previous climate change, with the long-lost wooly mammoth as extinction's all-too-visible mascot. In the end, the exhibition ranks highly when viewed through the lens of paleontology in Taiwan, providing a rare opportunity for everyone on the island. The temporary feeling of the show detracts a bit from the sense of timeless wonder such exhibitions can sometimes inspire, but the incredible remains, thought-provoking displays and varied collection of fossils all make it very much a worthwhile visit. Copyright © 2008 by Sebastian Pearce