The mammoth that never was

In the three-hundred-fifty years since Europeans first received reports of a mysterious creature in Siberia called the mammoth, nothing has engendered more public fascination about them than the occasional discovery of nearly intact, frozen carcasses with flesh still attached. At some point in the nineteenth century, frozen mammoths became a staple of catastrophist theories. As one of the usual suspects of those theories, frozen mammoths have regularly been trotted out to prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth's axis can suddenly change location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of Egypt, or that Noah's global flood was real. Sometimes they prove all of the above despite the fact that the believers date them thousands of years apart.

Three particular mammoths show up more often that all of the others combined. The Adams mammoth, named for the person who excavated it, was discovered in 1799 near the mouth of the Lena River. In 1806, Mikhail Adams journeyed to the spot and recovered most of the skeleton and several hundred pounds of skin and hair. This was the first nearly complete mammoth recovered and scientifically described. It was the basis for all nineteenth century ideas about what a mammoth looked like in life. I have given an entire chapter to this mammoth in my book. The Berezovka mammoth, named after the place where it was found in 1901, was also nearly complete. Since scientists were able to get to it soon after its discovery, they were able to examine muscles and remains of some of the internal organs. In between the Adams and the Berezovka was the Benkendorf mammoth. In 1846 a surveying party, led by a Lt. Benkendorf, discovered a complete mammoth exposed by a flood of the Indigirka river. Before the mammoth was carried away, the party was able to make some measurements and examine the contents of the mammoth's stomach. The main difference between these three famous mammoths is that the Adams and Berezovka mammoths are real, while the Benkendorf mammoth is a complete fiction.

The fictitious nature of the story hasn't hurt its popularity. In In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood Dr. Walt Brown cites the Benkendorf mammoth in to prove his version of the Noachian flood. John Cogan, in The New Order of Man's History, cites the same mammoth to prove his theory of Atlantis being sunk by a giant asteroid strike. Robert W. Felix cites the Benkendorf mammoth in Not by Fire but by Ice to prove his theory that magnetic pole reversals cause sudden and regular ice ages. In Darwin's Mistake: Antediluvian Discoveries Prove Dinosaurs and Humans Co-Existed, Hans J. Zillmer calls on the same mammoth to disprove both evolution and modern geology.

It's easy to point and laugh at the creationists and catastrophists for being suckered into believing that a fictional mammoth would support their theories. Recycling anecdotes is a well-established tradition among conspiracy theorists and other purveyors of forbidden knowledge. Unfortunately, the Benkendorf mammoth has just as long a history of being cited in textbooks, popular science writing, and even academic papers. Samuel Sharp's 1876 textbook Rudiments of Geology uses the Benkendorf mammoth as a source of information about the appearance and diet of mammoths as do the authors of the 1902 edition of The Cambridge Natural History, H. H. Lamb's 1977 book Climate: Present, Past and Future, and a 1983 Time-Life book, Ice Ages.

The story of Benkendorf's discovery originally appeared in a fairly obscure 1859 German book of science for young people, Kosmos für die Jugend by an author named Philipp Körber. Why has the Körber story managed to survive so long? More than anything else, I believe three elements have come together to turn Benkendorf's mammoth into a nearly unstoppable zombie. First, the original story was well told, filled with many plausible details, and included the solutions to some outstanding mysteries about mammoths. Second, because of the verisimilitude and answers, the story was adopted and retold in considerable detail by some very influential scientists. Their credibility led to many retellings in both the popular and scientific press. Finally, debunkings of the story have been weak, made by not credible writers, or located in hard to find places.

Kosmos für die Jugend. Mammoths weren't the only prehistoric animals on Körber's book.

In Körber's book, Benkendorf is an exemplary character, the son of a Baltic German schoolteacher, who dedicated himself to studying the mathematical arts. While serving in the Russian army, he came to the attention of his superiors who recommended him to the navy where, at the age of twenty-five, he was attached to a surveying expedition along the Siberian coast. Körber lets the young lieutenant tell the story in his own words, supposedly as a letter to a relative in Germany who passed it on to the author.

After a credible description of permafrost, a still unnamed and mysterious phenomenon, he describes the setting. The year of his expedition, 1846, had an unusually warm and early spring. Unseasonable rains melted away the snow and cleared the rivers while tearing away river banks and flooding the land. When the rains stopped, they could see that the Indigirka River was free of ice. He was given charge of a steam launch and sent to explore the new channels carved by the floods. "There it was," he writes," we made a strange discovery."

Suddenly our jager, ever on the outlook, called loudly, and pointed to a singular and unshapely object, which rose and sank through the disturbed waters.
 I had already remarked it, but not given it any attention, considering it only driftwood. Now we all hastened to the spot on the shore, had the boat drawn near, and waited until the mysterious thing should again show itself. Our patience was tried, but at last a black, horrible, giant-like mass was thrust out of the water, and we beheld a colossal elephant's head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in the water in an unearthly manner, as though seeking for something lost therein. Breathless with astonishment, I beheld the monster hardly twelve feet from me, with his half-open eyes yet showing the whites. It was still in good preservation. 

Körber's illustration of the Benkendorf mammoth. I haven't seen this illustration published anywhere except for Körber's book.

Benkendorf's crew secure the mammoth with ropes and chains and try to pull it to the shore, but its rear feet are frozen to the river bottom and they can't budge it. Refusing to give up, Benkendorf has them tie the ropes to stakes driven into the riverbank and waits for the river to excavate the mammoth for him. The next day, the Yakuti horsemen arrive and Benkendorf puts them to work reeling in his catch. 

Picture to yourself an elephant with the body covered with thick fur, about thirteen feet in height and fifteen in length, with tusks eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends, a stout trunk of six feet in length, colossal limbs of one and a half feet in thickness, and a tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair. The animal was fat and well grown; death had overtaken him in the fulness of his powers. His parchment-like, large, naked ears lay fearfully turned up over the head; about the shoulders and the back he had stiff hair about a foot in length, like a mane. The long outer hair was deep brown, and coarsely rooted. The top of the head looked so wild, and so penetrated with pitch, that it resembled the rind of an old oak tree. On the sides it was cleaner, and under the outer hair there appeared everywhere a wool, very soft, warm, and thick, and of a fallow-brown colour. The giant was well protected against the cold. The whole appearance of the animal was fearfully strange and wild. It had not the shape of our present elephants. As compared with our Indian elephants, its head was rough, the brain-case low and narrow, but the trunk and mouth were much larger. The teeth were very powerful. Our elephant is an awkward animal, but compared with this Mammoth, it is as an Arabian steed to a coarse, ugly, dray-horse. I could not divest myself of a feeling of fear as I approached the head; the broken, widely-opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy us with a roar.... 

The bad smell of the body warned us that it was time to save of it what we could, and the swelling flood, too, bid us hasten. First of all we cut off the tusks, and sent them to the cutter. Then the people tried to hew off the head, but notwithstanding their good will, this work was slow. As the belly of the animal was cut open the intestines rolled out, and then the smell was so dreadful that I could not overcome my nauseousness, and was obliged to turn away. But I had the stomach separated, and brought on one side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....

So intent are they in examining the mammoth that no one notices the river slowly undermining the riverbank. Suddenly, the mammoth is snatched from Benkendof's hands as the bank collapses taking the mammoth and five of the horsemen with it. Sailors from the ship manage to rescue the horsemen, but the mammoth is irretrievably lost.

Besides being a ripping good yarn, Körber's story had a lot going for it. At the time, only one fairly intact mammoth had been recovered and described in scientific literature. This was the Adams mammoth. Adams was able to recover an almost complete skeleton, a large part of the skin, and several bags of hair. However, most of the soft tissue had been eaten by scavengers, the tusks had been cut off and sold, and the hair had shed from the skin. This left the angle of the tusks and the distribution of the hair open to speculation. With no internal organs present, Adams could provide no information about what the mammoth ate. This was an area of great interest since knowing its diet would be a major clue about the past climate of the Arctic coast. Adams' account of recovering the mammoth was published and republished in several languages over a decade. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius reassembled the skeleton and published a detailed description of it along with large illustrations. Adams' and Tilesius' papers were the basis for all mammoth studies in the nineteenth century. Körber's description of Benkendorf's mammoth stuck closely to their descriptions, even where they made incorrect guesses.

Körber describes the tusks as "eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends." This follows Tilesius' attempt at reconstructing the placement of the tusks on the Adams' mammoth. The original tusks had been cut off and sold before Adams reached the mammoth (in fact, it was the ivory merchant who reported the find). Adams bought a pair of tusks on his way back from the coast which the merchant claimed were the originals from his skeleton. These tusks were, in fact, from a younger, smaller mammoth. Tilesius could only guess at their placement and put them on the wrong sides of the skull with the points curving out and back over the mammoth's shoulders. In part, because of Tilesius' incorrect guess and Körber's confirmation of it, the correct placement of the tusks would still be a topic of debate into the first decade of the twentieth century.

Tilesius' incorrect tusk placement confirmed by Körber.

The idea that the hair on the mammoth should be in the form of a mane, rather than equally distributed about the body, comes from Adams. Adams described the mammoth, when he first viewed it, as having "a long mane on the neck." By the time Adams reached St. Petersburg, all of the hair had fallen off of the skin. Since Adams says most of the hair had fallen off by the time he reached the mammoth, it might be that the only hair he saw still attached was around the neck and shoulders. In any case, this was another incorrect assumption that gained support from Körber's tale.

Körber provided two other details about the mammoth's appearance that were pure speculation and that turned out to be incorrect. The "tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair" is a nice detail that goes along with the lion-like mane. On Adams' mammoth, the tail had been carried off by scavengers; its appearance was anybody's guess. The "parchment-like, large, naked ears" are a convincing detail that make his mammoth more elephant-like, specifically like an African elephant, but badly suited to the Arctic. When Adams began excavating his mammoth, most of the flesh and the skin of the head had been eaten by scavengers. However, one side of the head was still buried and had preserved its skin and ear. Adams mentioned only that ear was "furnished with a tuft of fur." By the time the skin reached St. Petersburg, the ear had dried out and was too damaged for Tilesius to draw any conclusions about its original appearance.

While all of these external details were corrected by the early years of the twentieth century, Körber's imaginative description of the contents of the mammoth's stomach is a important bit of misinformation that persisted almost to this day.

I had the stomach separated, and brought on one side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....

We can be fairly certain that Körber didn't set out to fool the scientific community. His book was intended for young people with an interest in science. Unfortunately, this one detail, taken as a scientific observation, had consequences in several fields. At the time, discovering what the mammoth ate was considered the most important evidence as to the environment in which it lived. Naturalists were divided between those who thought elephants in the Arctic meant Siberia had had a warm climate in the recent past, and those who thought mammoths were adapted to the cold, meaning Siberia's cold climate had never changed. The answer to that question had great implications for understanding the nature of the mammoth, the nature of the ice ages (still a new idea), and whether or not geological and climatological conditions changed gradually or catastrophically.

As with the physical appearance of the mammoth, Körber's speculation about the diet of the mammoth was based on solid science. In one of the earliest attempts at debunking the Benkendorf story, Johann Friedrich von Brandt pointed out that the description of the mammoth's diet accorded very closely with his own research into woolly rhinoceroses. He went on, rather testily, to accuse Körber with stealing his ideas on how mammoths and rhinoceroses came to be frozen in Siberia. Ten years before Körber's book came out, Brandt had published an extensive review of woolly rhino remains in the Russian imperial collection and previous studies on them. Brandt had examined the head of the first frozen woolly rhino discovered and observed: 

I have been so fortunate as to extract from cavities in the molar teeth of the Wiljui rhinoceros a small quantity of its half-chewed food, among which fragments of pine leaves, one-half of the seed of a polygonaceous plant, and very minute portions of wood with porous cells (or small fragments of coniferous wood), were still recognizable.

It is very likely that Körber was aware of Brandt's work. Brandt's first observations were published as a letter in the journal of the Royal Prussian Academy in 1846 in German, Körber's native language. His complete paper was published in the journal of the Russian academy. It was also reported in one of the most influential geology books of the century, Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, from the 1853 edition forward.

Besides Brandt, Körber had another source available to him. In 1805, a mastodon skeleton was discovered in Virginia by workmen digging a well. Word of the discovery made it to Bishop James Madison. In a letter to Benjamin Smith Barton, Madison described the most important part of the discovery: 

It is now no longer a question, whether the [mastodon] was a herbivorous or carnivorous animal. Human industry has revealed a secret, which the bosom of the earth had, in vain, attempted to conceal. In digging a well, near a Salt-Lick, in Wythe-county, Virginia, after penetrating about five feet and a half from the surface, the labourers struck upon the stomach of a mammoth. The contents were in a state of perfect preservation, consisting of half masticated reeds, twigs, and grass, or leaves. There could be no deception; the substances were designated by obvious characters, which could not be mistaken, and of which every one could judge; besides, the bones of the animal lay around, and added a silent, but sure, confirmation.

Barton was an influential scientist in his own right and the publisher of the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Barton not only published Bishop Madison's letter, he forwarded it to Baron Georges Cuvier who quoted it in his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes. Like Lyell's Geology, Recherches was an enormously influential book that went through numerous editions. Even before the first edition of Recherches was published, American readers knew that the story was wrong. In 1809, Madison wrote to several of the American journals that had published his letter to say that his sources had exaggerated. It was true that the vegetable matter was found inside the skeleton of the mastodon, but it was no different from the vegetable matter in the soil surrounding the skeleton. Unfortunately, no one thought to tell Cuvier and the misinformation was repeated in every edition of Recherches.

The story of the Benkendorf mammoth made it into academic and popular science literature in the early 1860s, just a few years after the publication of Körber's book. By the end of the century, some of the details were so well established that they had could stand up against newer, and more correct, data. A mammoth well enough preserved that it still had its stomach matter intact wasn't discovered until 1901 when the Berezovka mammoth was found. Otto Herz recovered thirty-five pounds of plant matter from the mammoth's stomach and mouth, which turned out to be meadow grasses and not conifers. This is an important distinction. Although elephants can eat almost any plant matter, their teeth and guts are specialized as grazers—eaters of grasses and ground plants--not browsers--eaters of branches and leaves—like mastodons and woolly rhinos. This is a huge distinction in defining what mammoths were and what their environment was.

Because the Benkendorf story had so much prestige by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was almost unchallengeable. When the final analysis of the gut material recovered by Herz was published in 1914, the author of the study, V. N. Sukachev, even before describing the grasses and flowering herbs in its gut, almost apologetically wrote that his conclusions gave "no particular reasons for distrusting Benkendorf's testimony." The two diets continued side by side almost to the end of the twentieth century creating confusion about the nature of the mammoth's habitat.

How is it that the educated guesses in a children's science book gained such credibility? For that, the responsibility lies with two prestigious scientists who reprinted Körber's tale and by the weakness of the efforts to debunk it.

On 26 November 1842, twenty-seven year old Alexander von Middendorff left St. Petersburg for Siberia. Middendorff had been hired by the Academy of Sciences to investigate the phenomena of permafrost and conduct a survey of the flora and fauna of the Taymyr Peninsula. His tiny expedition included three other scientists, four Cossacks, and a Nenets interpreter. The expedition was brutal—Middendorff suffered freezing, starving, and severe depression—but ultimately was successful. Before returning to St. Petersburg, Middendorff mounted a second expedition to the Sea of Okhotsk and ascended the Amur River. Leaving one of his companions behind to continue gathering data in Yakutsk, he returned to the capital in 1845 as something of a scientific celebrity.

Alexander von Middendorff spent his entire life documenting everything he knew about Siberia. Was he too complete?

Middendorff's letters from the field were published in the journal of the Academy and a short report was written based on the letters. The Emperor found the report quite interesting and gave all of the scientists medals and pensions. There is no word whether the Cossacks or the interpreter received any reward for their parts. Middendorff then settled down to write the formal analysis of the data they had gathered. It took him thirty years. I'm sure any graduate student will empathize.

Middendorff found the remains of a mammoth while he was on the Taymyr Peninsula and almost died getting back. Immediately upon returning to St. Petersburg, he began to collect information about other discoveries of mammoth carcasses. Lyell included some information from Middendorff in the 1847 edition of his Geology. Middendorff wrote a long article on mammoths in 1860 as a warm up to his official report on his own find. This report appeared in 1867. Along with the details of his own find, Middendorff included an historical survey of previous finds which included the entire Benkendorf letter. This is the ultimate source of the transition of Körber's tale from the realm of educational fiction into the realm of fact.

It appears to me that Körber's tale came to Middendoff's attention because of Brandt's debunking of it. Middendorff and Brandt were colleagues and friends. At the same time Middendorff was writing the volume of his researches that included his mammoth, Brandt published, in a popular Russian magazine, an article on mammoths that concluded with his debunking of Körber. Brandt was quite emphatic in his rejection of the Benkendorf story: "[T]he whole story of Benkendorf is pure lie and invention. The expedition to the Indigirka never took place and could not take place because of the impenetrable masses of ice of the Arctic Ocean; Benkendorf is a work of imagination."

If Middendorff learned of Körber's tale from Brandt, he should also have known of Brandt's objections. For Middendorff, the most telling evidence of the story's fictitious nature should have been the sheer magnitude of Benkendorf's expedition. Middendorff's expedition to the Taymyr was made up of a mere four scientists, four Cossacks, and an interpreter. The idea that a fully crewed frigate with two steam cutters could have been rounded the peninsula a mere three years later must have sounded to Middendorff like fiction, and bad fiction at that. When Middendorff copied the Benkendorf letter into his report, he added a warning to his readers that they shouldn't put too much faith in the account: 

Since we know the birthday of the enterprising countryman of mine to whom we owe this extraordinary discovery, because we have before us his life's story and the story of his expedition down to the minor details, there would seem to be no doubt about this wonderful discovery. The real and invented are so cheekily woven together here that it is worthy of a place along side la Martiniere's fantasy of Novaya Zemlya [a famous seventeenth century hoax] that persisted for so long. But I do not deprive my readers of the pleasure of reading this.

 This is far from Brandt's uncompromising rejection of the story. Middendorff went further in qualifying his rejection. Following the account, he wrote: 

We can only hope that at some time in the future the author will publish this episode himself and describe many other adventures and occurrences experiences seen by him during his travels in Siberia. We are happy that at least a small grain from his rich store of information has come down to us.

 Middendorff implies that he thought that the Benkendorf letter, as published, was a generously embellished account of a real discovery though he, of all people, was in a position to have known better. Regardless of what he may have thought, such nuance and his various caveats were completely missed by later authors. Although Middendorff started out as an unknown teacher on a small research expedition, the quality of the monographs based on his research made him a well-respected authority within a very short time after his return. Scientists all over Europe and the Americas eagerly awaited new papers and carefully studied each one, though, in this case, not as carefully as they should have.

Middendorff's reports were published in German and have never been translated into English except in fragments used by English speaking scientists in their own works. William Boyd Dawkins was one of those scientists and the person most responsible for introducing Benkendorf to the English-speaking world and for lending credibility to the story. Dawkins was an influential British geologist who became involved in debates over the antiquity of man, labor rights, and the channel tunnel. It was the first of those that got him interested in mammoths.

William Boyd Dawkins.

In 1868, within a few months of Middendorff's monograph on mammoths being published, Dawkins referred to it in an article entitled "On the Range of the Mammoth" published in Popular Science Review. Dawkins included almost the entire text of the Benkendorf letter (in his own translation). He introduced the letter with "The fourth and by far the most important discovery of a body is described by an eye-witness of its resurrection; so valuable in its bearings that we translate it at some length." Dawkins went on to emphasize the importance of the apocryphal stomach contents: 

This most graphic account affords a key for the solution of several problems hitherto unknown. It is clear that the animal must have been buried where it died, and that it was not transported from any place further up stream, to the south, where the climate is comparatively temperate. The presence of fir in the stomach proves that it fed on the vegetation which is now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low, desolate, treeless, moss-covered tundra, in which the body lay buried—a fact that would necessarily involve the conclusion that the climate of Siberia, in those ancient days, differed but slightly from that of the present time. Before this discovery the food of the Mammoth had not been known by direct evidence.

 For the English-speaking world, this was the moment that the genie escaped the bottle. Dawkins either didn't notice Middendorff's qualifications or didn't understand their significance. Because Dawkins was a scientist of some prominence, other scientists and writers felt safe in following his lead. During the last part of the nineteenth century, dozens of writers made reference to the Benkendorf mammoth on Dawkins' authority.

After 1868, the story of the Benkendorf mammoth took off with a roar while attempts to debunk it, or even to make qualifications, as Middendorff did, gained no traction whatsoever. Brandt's debunking was published in a Russian language popular magazine and went almost entirely unnoticed. It was mentioned in 1867 in the Bulletin de la Société impériale des naturalistes de Moscou by Alexander Brandt, who wanted to assure his readers that there was no feud between Middendorff and Johann Brandt, and again in 1958 by B. A. Tikhomirov. I know of no other reference to Brandt's debunking during the intervening ninety-one years. Neither Middendorf nor Brandt made any further efforts to correct the misinformation being spread.

There was nothing extraordinary about the paper on mammoth extinction that Henry H. Howorth read at the 1869 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Howarth reviewed the unanswered questions about the mammoth and its environment, and proposed a catastrophic flood to account for both their extinction and the ice age (it was a common belief, at the time, that the mammoths went extinct before the ice age, not after). Howarth's flood theory was well within the mainstream of British geological thought at the time. Over the next decade he established himself as a solid figure in politics and as an historian. In the early 1880s, however, he began to develop his flood ideas in a series of articles published in Geological Magazine. In these, he took a more strident tone and denounced the uniformist orthodoxy of the geological community and what he called "the extreme Glacial views of [Louis] Agassiz." In 1887, he organized his ideas into a book, The Mammoth and the Flood. Two other books on his catastrophic ideas followed.

Howorth did not believe the Benkendorf story. In the first of his articles of the 1880s, Howorth revealed that he was familiar with several pieces that referenced Benkendorf, but he ignored the story. In fact, he went so far as to say, "I am not aware that the contents of the stomach of any Siberian Mammoth have been hitherto examined." In an article in 1882, Howorth directly took on Benkendorf: 

This notice has always seemed to me to be most suspicious. ... I confess my suspicions were not allayed when I found [Middendorff] had obtained it ... from a boy's book. ... It is very strange that if genuine no accounts of this discovery should have reached the ears of Baer or Brandt, Schmidt or Schrenck, who none of them mention it, and that it should be first heard of in a popular book for boys in [1859].

 Perhaps the most important, and thus frustrating, semi-debunking of Körber's story came in 1929. I. A. Tolmachoff's "Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros in Siberia" is a classic of mammoth paleontology. In it, Tolmachoff described all of the finds of mammoths with flesh still attached up to that date. His count of thirty-nine is still sometimes repeated, as is his map of their locations. My research brings the count up to about seventy-five after deducting the four rhinoceroses in his original count. Tolmachoff tells the story in detail, but is firm in his rejection of it, saying "Howorth quite correctly considers it a fiction. ... Such an expedition never took place to this part of Siberia. The first steamer arrived to the Lena River only... in 1881." As often as Tolmachoff has been read and cited, no one seems to have read beyond his first telling of the story to catch is rejection of it.

The Russian scientist B.A. Tikhomirov tried to deal with both the diet of misinformation and the Benkendorf story in an article that was published in Russian in 1958 and in English in 1961. The title "The Expedition That Never Was—Benkendorf's Expedition to the River Indigirka" should be all that most people need to see to get the point. Unfortunately, most people didn't see it. He was partly motivated by guilt. He had cited the Benkendorf letter in an earlier paper and later discovered his error by reading a paper by Brandt on the history of mammoth discoveries to 1866 with an unqualified rejection of the story. Following this revelation, Tikhomirov went to the naval archives to confirm that Benkendorf's expedition never happened. That there is no permission or budget recorded for it should have provided the most definitive debunking possible for anyone familiar with the Russian bureaucracy of the time (or an any bureaucracy of any country, for that matter).

Tikhomirov's paper arrived at what should have been a great time to influence catastrophist narratives and their use of the frozen mammoth. The fifties had begun to produce a bumper crop of catastrophists citing frozen mammoths as proof of their theories. The greatest of these was Immanuel Velikovsky, whose pinballing planets theory jammed all post ice age history together into a couple thousand years in order to prove the Old Testament. Charles Hapgood wanted the earth's crust to periodically, abruptly change location with relation to the poles. Otto Muck though he could explain the end of Atlantis by the strike of giant comet. The role of mammoths in these ideas was that they should have lived in temperate forests, as Benkendorf's diet indicated, and then been thrust into the Arctic and frozen according to their preferred catastrophe.

But, the year before Tikhomirov's paper appeared in a scientific journal, a much more sensationalist article appeared in the American popular press. Ivan T. Sanderson was a popular nature writer whose father had been killed by an angry rhinoceros (a detail that has nothing to do with this story). During the fifties, his focus gradually moved from topics like a nice book on elephants to serious endorsement of abominable snowmen. In 1960, he wrote an article that influences catastrophist narratives about mammoths to this day: “Riddle of the Frozen Mammoths.”

I'll leave Benkendorf here. In my next post. I want to say a few words about Sanderson's article and one of his most infamous sources.

This Is Going to Be So Fun

This week the book was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. The reviewer (Richard Conniff) takes a while to get to the book, preferring to start with wondering who I am.

 Discovering the Mammoth is one of those books that make you wonder about the author as much as about his topic. John J. McKay writes that he got started with a single blog post aiming to establish "a chronology of what was known about mammoths and when." Or rather, he got started because he noticed, while indulging his "great love of conspiracy theories and fringe ideas," that "lost history theories"—think Atlantis, flood geology and rogue planets—" all used frozen mammoths as proof positive of their ideas."

 I've written about this before.

One of the most popular contemporary catastrophist writers, Graham Hancock, has just issued a call to his readers to help him on a new project. He wants to know if anyone knows anything about mammoth discoveries, specifically if they know anything about Alaska. Hmmm.

Do I know anything about mammoth discoveries? Yes.

Am I familiar with catastrophist literature? Yes.

Am I familiar with recent geological literature on the soils in which late Pleistocene bones are found? Yes.

And other relevant scientific literature? Yes.

Do I know anything about Alaska? Yes.

So, here's a question, should I invite Mr. Hancock to Alaska so I can give him a tour of the places where mammoths are found and introduce him to the experts? It would have to be on his dime, of course, and I would reserve the rights to document the trip.

In any case, I plan to write about t his a lot.

A Zombie Mammoth Bites the Dust

A few years back, I mentioned the mammoth book actually was a byproduct of my love of fringe theories. A lo-o-ong time ago, when I was a teenager, I noticed that each fringe genre recycled a standard set of evidences that were proof positive of each writer's preferred theory. For geological catastrophists, frozen mammoths were right at the top of the list. Working in bookstores in my late twenties and early thirties, I played a game of find-the-mammoth with each new catastrophist book. Very few failed. An important part of the theory was the idea that mammoths had been frozen so fast that its meat was still fresh and delicious tasting. This week, one of those stories about mammoth meat was decisively debunked--not that that will make it go away.

In the 1690s, the literate classes of Western Europe became aware of ivory from a mysterious Siberian creature called mamant or mammoth. The natives said it was never seen alive. They belived it lived underground and died when it breathed surface air by accidentally tunneling out of its subterranean home, usually on river banks. They believed it was a currently living animal because the meat was fresh enough for their dogs to eat. None of these stories said that they ate the meat. And, dogs will eat their own shit, so that's not the best recommendation for the palatability of the meat. This detail, the freshness of the meat, was one of the things that made the mammoth so fascinating, more than any other extinct animal, and kept attention focused on it for the next century.

Once the mammoth was recognized, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a unique, extinct species, native to the North, more focus was placed on just how it came to be frozen. During the previous century, this was not a particularly difficult question. The mammoth was an elephant. During the biblical Deluge, they drowned and their corpses were washed north. When the waters receded, the now Arctic elephants rapidly froze. This theory fell into disfavor as the general literary consensus tipped toward viewing the Deluge as a metaphor or local event in the Middle East. On the geological side, the concept of uniformitarianism, that major changes happen very slowly, in small increments, also denied the idea of a sudden, global flood. This was immediately followed by the discovery of the ice ages. A slow warming and cooling world provided many opportunities for mammoths to become frozen.

Back to the mammoth. By 1850, only fourteen mammoths with some soft tissue attached had been reported since 1692, only four were supposed to have been relatively complete, and only one had been recovered. This made it easy to believe that each frozen mammoth was due to a rare and unique accident. Today, after 350 years, only seventy-five mammoths with soft tissue have been reported and only fourteen have been relatively complete. Due to global communication, the end of the Cold War, a rapid erosion of of local superstitions, and an appreciation of the high monetary value of mammoth carcasses, a third of those complete carcasses were reported and all of them recovered in the last ten years.

But, John, you may be asking (go ahead, ask), when did the mammoth feast enter the mythology? That's a very good question. I commend you on your persip... perisap... smartness. As I mentioned, the earliest reports of mammoth meat only mention dogs eating it. Dogs eating the meat are mentioned again a couple times in the nineteenth century. But, by the dawn of the twentieth century, I can't find a single account of humans eating it, let alone it being the main course of a great feast.

Back to catastophism. Frozen mammoths are now a staple of catastrophist theories. Frozen mammoths are among the usual suspects that catastrophists trot out to prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth’s axis can suddenly change location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of Egypt, some cosmological event dumped millions of cubic miles of ice on the earth, or that the Deluge was real. When any new catastrophist theory is proposed, frozen mammoths cannot be far behind. The mammoth most often cited, though often anonymously cited and turned into a plural, is the mammoth discovered on the Beresovka River in 1900.

This mammoth was only the second complete mammoth to be recovered. It was found halfway down a high bluff over the Beresovka River in northeastern Siberia. Its claims to fame are based on the date of its discovery and its high degree of preservation. It was only the second relatively complete mammoth recovered; the first was a century earlier. It was better documented than the first. Mikhail Adams, who recovered the first mammoth in 1806, was a botanist who quickly lost interest in it. The main documentation of it was written by the person who reconstructed the skeleton, Wilhelm Tilesius, who hated Adams. By contrast, the Beresovka mammoth was recovered by Otto Herz and Eugene Pfitzenmayer, who both were interested in the mammoth itself and respected each other. Finally, they wrote during a time when the interested audience for information about such discoveries was magnitudes larger than the audience for the Adams mammoth. They not only wrote several scientific articles on the discovery, the samples they brought back allowed other scientists to write papers on it. Pfitzenmayer even wrote a popular book on mammoths. Quite simply, the world knew more about this mammoth than any discovered before then and any since until Dima in 1977.

From here, the details of this mammoth move into catastophist literature following two paths. The first is because of the high quality of the remains themselves. The flesh and even parts of the organs were recognizably intact. Plant tissues from its last meal were still in its mouth and identifiable nearly a century before DNA sequencing. All of these details have led catastrophists to believe the mammoth was frozen suddenly and completely. An entire industry has grown up around this belief. Someday, I'll go over all the details of that, but, today, let's go over the small aspect of that belief that was debunked this week.

Catastrophism means suddenness. The significance of the Beresovka mammoth to catastophists is the idea that the perfection of its preservation was due to its being frozen in a few hours--faster than any known means of freezing. One line of thought using the Beresovka mammoth was based on the supposedly non-arctic food found in its unflossed mouth. The other is based on the quality of its meat. Twice now I've mentioned that several recorded accounts, before 1901, mention dogs eating the meat, but none mention humans eating it. So, did Herz or Pfitzenmayer make this claim about their mammoth? No, they did not.

The origin appears to have come from Herz' comment that the mammoth's flesh "looks as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat." This has been taken to mean it tasted like well-frozen beef or horse meat. It did not. Pfitzenmayer wrote that they could smell it a mile away and that they initially could only work on excavating it for a few minutes before fleeing to get some fresh air. Though it's not mentioned in either of their initial accounts. One of them did taste the meat.* One night, toward the end of their work, they got drunk and began daring the other to eat come of the meat. The dogs had shown that it wasn't fatal to eat (see dogs and shit, above). Finally, fortified with a lot of vodka and pepper, one of them was able to chew up a chunk of mammoth, but not swallow it.

Before I adjudge this story to be the origin of all mammoth feast stories, I want to suggest the possibility of an undocumented oral tradition that also fed into it. I'm an Alaskan. Many old, white Alaskans have a grandfather, know someone who had a grandfather, or whose grandfather knew someone who regularly ate frozen mammoth. The Seattle catastophist Donald Patton wrote that "mammoth steaks have even been featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks." None of these stories has been documented as true. All of these stories date back to the gold rush days. None of the Russians before then make that claim, none of the Anglo-white guys since then make that claim, and I've never met an Alaskan native that makes that claim. My opinion is that all of these stories are based on sourdoughs (old white Alaskans) BSing cheechakos (newcomers).

And now, after many digressions and distractions, I've finally arrived at the great mammoth feast. In 1920, Martin Gardner published A Journey to the Earth's Interior, Or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? His book is the most mature development of the hollow earth theory. The central idea of this theory is that the surface of the earth is a bubble with an empty space inside. The earliest western development of this idea was by Edmond Halley of comet fame. Various later versions developed ideas of what was inside. Gardner watched the many attempts during his life to reach the poles and decided it was not possible because there were no poles. When explorers reached a certain high latitude, they entered a hole that led to the interior world. Gravity held people against the under side of the bubble and a tiny sun balanced at the center made life possible there. When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Pellucidar based on the same idea, Gardner wrote to him asking if he had anything to do with the books. I don't know if Burroughs answered.

Gardner, for once, did not need the biblical flood or any other type of catastrophe to put frozen mammoths in the Arctic. Like most catastrophists, he believed that mammoths were normal tropical elephants whose appearance in the Arctic needed explanation. His solution was that they lived in the eternal tropics of the inner world. Occasionally, however, they would fall into rivers or off the northern coast, drown, have their bodies carried through the polar hole, be deposited on the Siberian coast, buried, and frozen there before they could decompose--obviously.

Gardner dedicated an entire chapter to the mammoth and within that chapter, a subtitled section to the mammoth feast. Gardner specifically says it was Herz who held a banquet with meat from the Berezovka mammoth "and he asked scientists in other parts of the world to contribute other ancient foods--such as corn dug up from the ruins of Egyptian cities." Later versions of the story have added that Tsar Nicholas II was the guest of honor. Other versions of the feast removed Herz from the story and made Guillaume Apollinaire, the Italian/French poet, the guest of honor. Later, when asked about the feast, Gardner would only vaguely say, it was in all the papers, look it up yourselves.

This, Klondike tall tales, and other rumors established the popular legend that, at some time, there had been a feast or dinner of mammoth steaks. Thirty years later, a newer version appeared: at some point, soon after WWII, the Explorer's Club of New York featured mammoth steaks on the menu of its annual dinner. Oddly, this story, with its exactness, has not been repeated as often as Gardner's vague story. But there is some truth to this story, the Explorer's Club is a real organization, it is in New York, and it has a fancy dinner with exotic fare every year. Despite this story having so many verifiable points, I have never come across a catastrophist who looked onto it enough to verify the fact of the mammoth steaks. But, academic rigor has never been a feature of fringe thought; recycling is their primary feature. After sixty-five years, someone has finally looked into this factoid.

Here is the story as reconstructed by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis, Timothy J. Walsh, Eric J. Sargis, and Adalgisa Caccone in an article in PLOS One. The famous menu was the from the 1951 annual Explorers Club dinner, held in January that year. The source of the popularization of the story is an article in The Christian Science Monitor that appeared several days later. The first point they make completely kills the legend. The menu didn't say mammoth; it said Megatherium, which is an extinct species of South American giant ground sloth that did not live in the far north. Although this might disappoint catastrophists, in its way, it is much more interesting. Megatherium remains are far rarer than mammoths and, as it is not an Arctic species, well preserved soft tissue would have been insanely rare. If only there was some way to prove that.

There is. Paul Griswold Howes, the curator of the Bruce Museum missed the dinner. Wendell Phillips Dodge, the chairman of the club, was good enough to save a piece of the Megatherium for Howes. Rather than eat the tasty bit, Howes preserved it and added it to the museum's collections. Dodge was rather--well--dodgy about the origin of the meat. Originally, he claimed it came from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. If true, this would have extended the range of the Megatherium by over 10,000 miles. He is also reported to have said he had discovered a formula by which he could convert sea turtle meat into giant sloth meat. I think we can assume that formula included a generous helping of bullshit.

Spoiler: It's not mammoth meat (source)

Glass et al. have the tools to go beyond merely determining that the meat was not mammoth. They were able to determine what it really was. All they needed was the sample that Howes stored at the Bruce Museum. Howes carefully labeled the sample so it wasn't difficult to find. The meat had been cooked and stored in isopropyl alcohol, but this didn't prevent them from extracting DNA for identification. Unlike forensic crime dramas, they weren't able to determine that it was a near-sighted, left-handed, yellow sloth from a bad part of Davenport, Iowa. However, they were able to determine that it wasn't a mammoth or any kind of sloth. It was, in fact, a green sea turtle of a sub-species native to the Pacific Ocean. They weren't able to narrow it down further than that. The green sea turtle is now an endangered species. In those days it was a favored species for making turtle soup, a major factor in its becoming endangered.

Although it's easy to dismiss the mammoth feast as so much fringe silliness, it has had a very real effect on how the public perceives mammoths. The idea that there is almost perfect mammoth tissue available in the Siberian tundra is one of the drivers of the idea that each new discovery might provide the necessary genetic material to clone a mammoth. Hundreds of frozen mammals have been in the northern tundra. None of them have provided decent DNA for cloning.

This isn't the end of the story. In 1979 a prospector near Fairbanks uncovered the frozen remains of a steppe bison. Rather than try to blast the thing clear, he reported it to the University of Alaska and R. Dale Guthrie was able to conduct a proper excavation of it. It is one of the best preserved Pleistocene mammals ever recovered. It was brought to the university and, along with being properly examined, the main parts of the body were prepared for display in the museum. The chief taxidermist, Erick Grandqvist, saved a piece of meat from the Bison's neck. When his work was done, he Guthrie, and visiting paleontologist, Björn Kurtén made a stew out of it. The meat was tough, but edible.

The Ninety-Foot Plum Tree, Filling Some Gaps

Years before I started writing a book about mammoths, I invented a game I called "Find the Mammoth" with any new catastrophist author I came across. Frozen mammoths are found everywhere in catastrophist literature. It doesn't matter what the writer's preferred catastrophe is—the Biblical flood, Atlantis, Lemuria, rogue planets, or a sudden relocation of the poles—the discovery of frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia conclusively proves their theory. The logic behind the claim is simple: elephants are tropical animals, mammoths are elephants, therefore Siberia used to be tropical; intact, frozen mammoths prove the shift from tropical to Arctic happened in matter of hours. Once the mammoth has been established as evidence, the writers usually follow up by listing a few instances of tropical or temperate flora being discovered above the Arctic Circle.

Eight or ten years ago, while playing a round of Find the Mammoth, I came across one of these flora claims: the ninety-foot plum tree. I discovered the claim on the old Talk Origins site in a piece by E.T. Babibski. Babinski first ran into the claim that such a tree had been found above the Arctic Circle from the creationist "Dr." Kent Hovind. The ninety-foot plum tree was apparently a standard bit of evidence that Hovind tossed out in his presentations. Hovind described the tree as being frozen with green leaves and ripe fruit. The details fit nicely with the idea that Siberia was suddenly and catastrophically frozen. He credited the discovery to Baron von Toll who found the tree in the New Siberia Islands, six hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. Babibski did a very good job of debunking the claim by tracking it to its original source.

Unfortunately, most of Hovind's web presence disappeared after he went to jail for tax evasion, so I cannot find a good quote. Babinski was able to find out from Hovind that the tree anecdote was something he had read in a newsletter called "Bible-Science News" about ten years earlier. After some searching, Babinski was able to find the source, "The Mystery of the Frozen Giants" by Lee Grady (vol. 23, no. 4, April 1985). Grady credited the book The Waters Above (1981) by young-earth creationist Joseph Dillow. I haven't been able to lay my hands on a copy of Dillow's book for a price I'm willing to pay, but the exact quote can be found in dozens of creationist sites on the internet and I was able to find a Croatian translation of the entire chapter. This is the quote, which Babinski tells us appears on page 316: 

Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a saber-toothed tiger and a 90-foot plum tree with green leaves and ripe fruit on its branches over 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the New Siberian Islands. Today, the only vegetation that grows there is a one-inch high willow.

 Grady copied this almost word-for-word. Dillow cited as his sources, the book The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North-East Siberia (1926) by Bassett Digby and the journal article "The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia" (1929) by I.P. Tolmachoff. I do have my own copies of both of these. Neither writer was a flake. Digby was a naturalist who had traveled extensively in Siberia and written several enjoyable books about his experiences there. Tolmachoff was a well-respected academic and curator of the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum. Tolmachoff cites four different works by Baron Toll in his article and mentions evidence of Pleistocene alder trees (Alnus fruticosa) on the New Siberia Islands four separate times without, however, specifically describing that one find. The description of the tree is in Digby. 

It was along the south coast [of Great Lyakhovski Island] that Toll found his extraordinary layers of what he called "fossil ice [permafrost]." They were as much as 70 ft. thick. On the top of them lay the post-Tertiary deposits in which were remains of wooly rhinoceros and mammoth, American stag, reindeer, a horse (apparently the Mongolian wild horse, which still exists), saiga, antelope, ovibos, and sabre-toothed tiger. There was lying among them, too, a 90 ft. alder-tree (Alnus fructicosa), with even its roots and seeds preserved. 

Digby with mammoth tusks in Siberia. source

Babinski's eagle eyes noticed something that I would have completely missed had he not pointed it out. The botanical name is misspelled in Digby's account. The correct name for that variety of alder, which Tolmachoff uses, is Alnus fruticosa. Digby wrote Alnus fructicosa with an extra "c" in the second word. Fruticosa means bushy; fructicosa means fruiting. There is no plant called Alnus fructicosa.

 Alnus fructicosa. This tree is not ninety feet tall. source

Since Digby has a description of that one find and Tolmachoff does not, it looks like Dillow based his paragraph just on Digby and not on Digby and Tolmachoff. I suspect Dillow footnoted Tolmachoff just to add authority to the story. Digby mentions the ninety-foot height, so Dillow can be forgiven that one detail. Digby and Tolmachoff both are specific on the point that the tree was an alder. Even if they had called it the non-existent fruiting alder, that would not have made it a plum tree. The genus for plum trees is Prunus, not Alnus. Digby describes "roots and seeds preserved," not "green leaves and ripe fruit." And plum trees do not grow to be ninety feet tall. At this point, it looks bad for Dillow.

Babinski thinks Digby made an honest mistake in saying Toll found a ninety-foot tree. I agree that the giant tree was the result of an honest mistake but, as I have discovered, the mistake was not Digby's. Let's go back to Baron Toll and what he really wrote. Baron Eduard Gustav von Toll (1858-1902) was a Baltic German geologist who conducted three expeditions into Siberia for the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. On his first expedition he investigated two mammoth sites. On the second, he mapped a large area west of the Lena River. On the third, he traveled out onto the ice of the Arctic Ocean and was never seen again. Toll's tree was found during the second expedition. I have not been able to lay my hands on the final report of the expedition; the nearest copy is apparently at Yale. Fortunately, Babinski was able to get a translation of the relevant passage (the original is in German). In it, Toll describes the exposed strata of a bluff on Great Lyakhovsky Island:

And the layers from top to bottom as follows: 

1. a peat covering composed of water mosses among other things.
 2. a frozen, sandy clay layer with Alnus fruticosa, Salix sp., a scapula of Lepus sp. [i.e., a shoulder bone of a saber-toothed tiger—Babinski’s note]
 3. similar layers with Pisidium sp. and Valvata sp. The reclining nature of this layer is covered here. In figure 1 these same layers 1 and 2 form the upper horizon, only the deposit of the sea basin with Pisidium and Alvata is missing there.
 The surprising thing in this instance is the discovery of Alnus fruticosa which is so wonderfully preserved that the leaves hold fast on the twigs of the boughs–indeed even whole clusters of blossom casings are preserved. The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table. With a magnifying glass, one can even recognize in figure 2 the blossom casings of the Alnus fruticosa.

 Babinski comes to a reasonable conclusion that Digby somehow added the twenty foot height of the tree to the seventy feet of the permafrost layer to come up with a total height of ninety feet. The sentence, he says, is not entirely clear in the original. Digby might have read that the tree jutted out and took the 15-20 feet to mean that much of the tree protruded from the ice while the rest of the tree extended the full length of the seventy-foot deep layer of permafrost.

This is where Babinski ends his search. I think Babinski did an excellent job at slapping down Dillow's plum tree. Digby's book was more in the tone of a popular travel narrative than an academic monograph and has no bibliography or source notes. Babinski had no reason to look for additional sources between Toll's formal report and Digby. However, in my own mammoth research over the years, I have come across a few more links in the chain from Toll to Digby and Digby to Dillow.

First, let's examine the gap between Toll and Digby. Look at what's missing from the excerpt of Toll that Babinski gives us. There is no mention of the seventy-foot thick permafrost layer. Maybe, it's mentioned in another part of the report. If it is, it's not in close enough proximity to the 15-20 foot figure to make the mistake that probable. Also missing is the long list of animals that Digby gave.

Toll, the Arctic explorer. source

Toll returned from his expedition in January 1894. The May issue of the journal of the (British) Royal Geographical Society published a brief summary of the expedition that mentioned "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones." No thickness was given for the permafrost. This article was based on a brief report Toll sent to the Russian Academy right after his return. Toll gave a somewhat more detailed version of the discovery in a public lecture in St. Petersburg the following April, but no transcript of the talk was published until the end of the year, and then only in Russian. Finally, in April 1895, over a year after Toll's return, the Royal Geographical Society published an English translation of the talk for their readers.

 It is well known how widely spread mammoth tusks are over North Siberia, and how fabulously numerous they are in the New Siberia islands. And it is also well known that, besides the tusks and the bones of the mammoth, whole skeletons of this animal and of the rhinoceros, as well as of the Bison friecus and the Oviboa motchatus, are found.
 [...]
 The cliffs of the Great Liakhoff island also proved to be very instructive, as it appeared that the fresh-water sandy clay, which covers the underground layers of ice, contains, together with shells of molluscs (Cyclas and Valvata), remains of insects, and bones of Post-Tertiary mammals, which prove that this clay belongs to the mammoth bed; also whole trees of alder (Alnus fruticosa), willow, and birch, 15 feet high, and with perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones.

 Here we have four of the nine animals that Digby mentioned and the alder mentioned as one of three species of preserved trees fifteen feet high. Five animals are missing as is the seventy foot number for the permafrost layer. Later in 1895, Toll's full report was published by the Russian Academy. This is the source Babinski quoted above. The question remains, where did Digby get his information? It’s most likely that it came from the most famous anarchist in the world, Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin was and is a fascinating figure. The anarchist prince was pacifist who rejected violent, revolutionary confrontation in favor of a philosophy based on cooperation and mutual aid. His philosophy did not come from a traumatic experience, such as Lenin's whose brother was executed as a radical; it was based his reading of Darwin and his scientific observations of insect and animal communities. As a political exile, Kropotkin, like so many others, often supported himself as a journalist. Unlike the other political exiles, Kropotkin was a popular science journalist as well as a revolutionary journalist. He was also an expert on the geology of Siberia.

 The Anarchist Prince. source

The July 1900 issue of the journal of the Royal Geographical Society carried an article by the Prince entitled "Baron Toll on New Siberia and Circumpolar Flora." The article was a review a new article by Toll that had been published in Russian the previous year. Kropotkin's review contains this passage: 

The glacial formations are represented on the southern coast of the Great Lyakhovski island by a lower bed, about 70 feet high, of ice, and an upper bed of clayey fresh-water deposits, always frozen, and containing tusks and pieces of the skin of the mammoth, as well as full frozen carcases of Ovibos and rhinoceros. Remains of horses, stags (the noble American stag), antelopes, saigas, and even of a tiger, were found in this bed. To prove that these animals lived and fed on the spot, a complete tree of Alnus fruticosa, 90 feet long, with all its roots, leaves, and fruits, was found.

 This is very close to Digby's description. The seventy-foot thick deposit of permafrost is mentioned, followed by the list of animals, and, most importantly, the ninety-foot alder. There are only slight differences. Kropotkin only lists eight animals, Digby has nine. Reindeer is the missing animal. Digby describes the tree as with "its roots and seeds preserved." Kropotkin gives a little more description by saying the tree was preserved "with all its roots, leaves, and fruits."

Is this the end of the line? Can we definitively say that Digby's source for the ninety-foot tree was Kropotkin's 1900 review article? Is it safe to say the last few differences between Digby and Kropotkin are small enough to ignore? We could do that, but we would be wrong.

Since 1883, Kropotkin had been earning a small income writing articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The most famous of these is his long entry on anarchism that appeared in the famous 1911 edition. In that edition he also wrote a number of smaller pieces relating to Siberia, including one for the New Siberian Archipelago. In it we find the now familiar passage: 

Along the southern coast of Bolshoy Baron Toll found immense layers of fossil ice, 70 ft. thick, evidently relics from the Ice Age, covered by an upper layer of Post-Tertiary deposits containing numbers of perfectly well preserved mammoth remains, rhinoceros, Ovibos, and bones of the horse, reindeer, American stag, antelope, saiga and even the tiger. The proof that these animals lived and fed in this latitude (73 20' N), at a time when the islands were not yet separated from the continent, is given by the relics of forest vegetation which are found in the same deposits. A stem of Alnus fruticosa, 90 ft. high, was found with all its roots and even fruits. 

Here it is, all three parts in the same order—permafrost, animals, tree—the reindeer has been added to the animal list, and the leaves of the tree are no longer mentioned. At this point, I do think we can say with confidence that Digby's source for the ninety-foot alder was Kropotkin's article in the 1911 Britannica.

There is now only one gap in the informational chain from Toll to Digby. That is Toll's 1899 article in the journal of the Russian Academy. I have been unable to lay my hands on a copy of that particular issue. It seems unlikely that Toll made an error reporting his own research, especially since he had made that particular point at least twice before in print venues. However, it seems equally unlikely that Kropotkin, a trained scientist, would have made such a mistake translating from his native language into a language that he was fully fluent in. If neither scientist was in error, who does that leave?

The words fifteen (пятнадцать) and ninety (девяносто) are as different in Russian as they are in English. However, the style in both Russian and English journals at the time was to print numbers as numerals, not words. Thus, it would only take a typesetting error of one character to change 20 into 90. This could have happened either at the Russian printers or at the English ones. Like Babinski's theory that Digby added seventy to twenty to get ninety, this is only speculation on my part. Predictably, I think my speculation is the more likely solution.

To my knowledge, in the quarter century after Kropotkin first published the error (whose ever it was), it was only repeated once—by Digby in 1926. I cannot find any additional mention of the tree until after WWII. In the post-war years, the first mentions I can find are not from creationist sources but from the godfathers of postwar, American, secular catastrophism, Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Hapgood.

Velikovsky published first. In 1950, MacMillan published his book Worlds in Collision which postulated a revised chronology for ancient Egyptian history (he removed a couple centuries) and explained various Old Testament miracles as the effects of Venus and Mars pinballing around the solar system for a thousand years before settling into their current orbits. Due to a ham-handed reaction by the scientific community, Velikovsky became a fringe martyr and his books remained in print for the rest of life. Velikovsky touched on Toll's tree in his third book, Earth in Upheaval (1955). This book was intended to present the geological evidence for his theories. The tree appears in chapter two, the one about the frozen mammoths.

 Eduard von Toll repeatedly visited the New Siberian Islands from 1885 to 1902, when he perished in the Arctic Ocean. … On Maloi, one of the group of Liakhov Islands, Toll found the bones of mammoths and other animals together with the trunks of fossil trees with trunks and cones.

 This is an interesting version. Velikovsky does not mention any length for the tree. In fact, he mentions only "trees," not any specific tree. He also makes the curious mistake of putting the find on the wrong island. Maloi is Little Lyakhovsky, not Great Lyakhovsky as stated by Toll, Kropotkin, and Digby. Velikovsky is the first of our writers not to trace his information through Digby. Instead he gives as his source Rev. D. Gath Whitley, "The Ivory Island of the Arctic Ocean," in the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute (1910), an organization founded to defend "the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture ... against the opposition of Science falsely so called." Velikovsky's description is faithful to Whitleys', including the island mistake.

 They first went to Maloi, which is one of the Liakoff Islands, and the second island that Liakoff discovered. In this island they discovered the bones of mammoths and other animals, and they also found the trunks of fossil trees, with leaves and cones.

 Did Whitley introduce this mistake into the chain of information? No, as it turns out. Whitley based his version on the first report published in The Geographical Journal in 1894, the short summary. In it they wrote:

 On May 1, MM. Toll and Shileiko, accompanied by one Cossack and three Lamutes, left the mainland and landed on the south coast of the Malyi Lyakhov island. Exploration was begun at once, and at the very start M. Toll came across the interesting fact that under the perpetual ice, in a sweet-water deposit, which contained pieces of willow and bones of post-tertiary mammals (the mammoth layer), were complete trees of Alnus fruticosa, 15 feet long, with leaves and cones.

 Why would I go on this long about the Velikovsky strain if he had nothing to do with the ninety-foot plum tree? He would, indeed, be nothing more than an interesting footnote except for the fact that he has had his own influence on creationist and Biblical catastrophist thought. Velikovsky had a certain appeal to Biblical literalists because he attacked mainstream geology and seemed to provide a scientific veneer to some of the greater miracles of the Old Testament. John Whitcomb’s 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, co-authored by Henry Morris, is one of the founding documents of modern creationist geology. Whitcomb's original version, considerable credit was given to Velikovsky, though this was almost eliminated by the time the book saw print. Donald Wesley Patten was more open and honest about his debt to Velikovsky. In his 1966 book The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, he gives a brief overview of Velikovsky as one of his predecessors. In private, he spent years unsuccessfully trying to cozy up to Velikovsky and be recognized as his peer. Velikovsky absolutely did not want to be associated with creationists and other Biblical literalists. He physically ran away from Patten once when they met at conference (he later apologized).

Patten had his own ideas on how the planets ricocheted around the solar system and, like Velikovsky and almost every catastrophist of the Twentieth Century, he presented frozen mammoths as proof of his version. But when he mentioned Toll's tree, he described it in a way that was different from Velikovsky, but familiar to us.

 Baron Edward Toll, the explorer, reported finding a fallen 90-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit and green leaves still on its branches, in the frozen ground of the New Siberian Islands. The only tree vegetation that grows there now is a one-inch high willow.

 Here are the most important elements of Dillow’s version—a ninety-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit, and green leaves. There is no mystery about Patten’s source. It’s a direct quote and he cites the author. It is Charles Hapgood, Velikovsky’s only equal among post-war secular catastrophists. Hapgood was a New England based professor of history whose main contribution to catastrophism was to popularize an idea he called Earth Crustal Displacement (he borrowed the idea from a privately published book by Hugh Auchincloss Brown). The idea that he put forth was a variation on the much older idea that the Earth’s axial tilt had abruptly changed in the past. In the original version, The Earth’s axis had once been perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun. This gave the Earth an Edenic temperate climate from pole to pole. Some cosmic catastrophe in ancient times had tipped the Earth’s axis to its present 23.4° off perpendicular. Naturally, the catastrophe was recorded in the usual ancient legends of floods, fire from the sky, and days when the sun refused to rise and frozen mammoths are proof of this. For both Velikovsky and Patten, this was a centerpiece of their catastrophic narratives.

In the variation the Hapgood promoted, the Earth itself was not knocked off its axis; it had always had more or less the same axial tilt. Instead, it was only the crust that moved. Rather than some passing rogue planet whacking the entire Earth out of line, it was some Earth-born imbalance that caused the crust to suddenly slip in relation to the mantle and core, which kept the same alignment. One moment, the mammoths were calmly munching on giant alders and the next, both mammoths and trees had been thrown into the Arctic where they instantaneously froze. Hapgood published his theory as a book in 1958, Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Patten took his quote from a magazine abridgment of the mammoth chapter published two years later. The book version is a little more detailed than the magazine version.

 Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been ninety feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Toll claimed that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches. Yet, at the present time, the only representative of tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high.

 Hapgood cited Digby as his source. If he had stopped after his first two sentences, he would have been faithful to Digby. Digby only mentioned roots and seeds; he did not mention leaves or fruit. The words "leaves" and "fruit" do appear in some of the accounts before Digby. In chronological order they are:

• The original 1894 short notice of Toll's return in The Geographical Journal read: "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones."
• The 1895 translation of his lecture published a year later read: "perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones."
• Toll's 1895 formal report read: "the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots… one can even recognize… the blossom casings."
• Kropotkin's 1900 review of Toll’s later article read: "roots, leaves, and fruits."
• Kropotkin's 1911 Britannica entry read: "roots and even fruits."

Nowhere does Toll claim that that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to the tree’s branches. Leaves are mentioned in Toll’s notice of return, in his lecture, and in Kropotkin's review article. Toll refers to the alder's seed clusters as cones the first two times he mentions them and as blossoms the third. Kropotkin refers to them as fruit in both of his pieces. The only place both leaves and fruits are both mentioned are in Kropotkin's review article. I don't believe Hapgood read any of those sources. Hapgood was a trained historian. If he had read any of the first four on the list—three journal articles and a scholarly monograph—he would have preferred to cite them over Digby's popular travel narrative. As a source, Digby only outranks the encyclopedia article, which does not mention leaves. Did Hapgood make those details up? Unless some other mention of fruit and leaves comes to light, it appears he did. Even if he did read one or more of the earlier sources and simply forgot to cite them, he is guilty of exaggeration for making the leaves and fruit green and ripe. At this point, it also appears that it was Hapgood who seized on Digby's misspelled fructicosa to make the tree a fruit tree rather than an alder as Digby clearly stated.

This finally brings us back to Dillow. I can say with certainty that Dillow took his version of the tree directly from Hapgood with no middle-men involved. I’ll go farther and say he took it from the second, revised edition of Hapgood's book published in 1968 under the title The Path of the Pole. I can be this certain because Dillow cites that edition of Hapgood several times in the same chapter as Toll’s tree, he places the details in the same order as Hapgood, and the first fourteen words of his passage are exactly the same as in Hapgood's passage. As to why Dillow would cite different sources than those he really used, I think the answer is simple; he relied on tricks known to every lazy student since the invention of the term paper. Dillow copied Hapgood's source notes to make it look like he did more research than he really did. Adding Tolmachoff to the note, even though he was of questionable relevance, made the note more substantial and impressive. Having a series of source notes that move from author to author is more substantial and impressive than repeating the same source over and over.

In the final measure, it appears that Dillow's only crime, with regards to Toll's tree, was lazy scholarship and making it a plum tree. That’s not to say he isn’t guilty of other intellectual crimes. The parts of Dillow's book that I've been able to read are filled with embellishment, exaggeration, misrepresentation, and outright dishonesty. One example will suffice to demonstrate. This "fact" has been widely distributed on the internet, usually side-by-side with the ninety-foot plum tree.

 Dr. Jack A. Wolfe in a U. S. Geological Survey Report (1978) told that Alaska once teemed with tropical plants. He found evidence of mangroves, palm trees, Burmese lacquer trees, and groups of trees that now produce nutmeg and Macassar oil. 

Dr. Wolfe did indeed say that tropical plants once grew in Alaska... during the Eocene 34-50 million years ago. This compressing of the prehistoric past into one event is not uncommon among catastrophists. Some catastrophist writers, at least on the internet, might genuinely have trouble grasping geological timescales. I don't think Dillow is one of them.

Even though Babinski wrote his debunking almost twenty years ago, the myth of the ninety-foot fruit tree is still alive and well. As a plum tree, Toll's tree continues to appear in creationist literature usually as evidence of the Noachian Deluge. Among secular catastrophists, the tree usually appears among supporters of Hapgood's crustal displacement, such as Graham Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath (yes, that's his real name). Babinski's debunking gets linked to and copy/pasted into online fora again and again to no avail. Cut the tree down in one place and it pops up in another. Recycling is an essential part of fringe writing. The writers comb through each other's works for anecdotes to use as evidence for their pet theories. Many writers never leave the echo chamber nor look for any new information that might challenge their anecdotes or even add a couple of interesting new details. Leaving the echo chamber would expose them to actual authorities and those are to be avoided at all costs; they're out to suppress the truth. For fringe writers, other fringe writers, even those with competing theories are better sources than actual experts. For that reason, we can expect to see Baron von Toll's giant fruit tree again and again into the future.