Arctic Quaternary Mammal Collections in the Museums of Yakutsk (Yakutia, East Siberia, Russia)

Abstract

Many Ice Age fossil mammals remains are found in Yakutia, which occupies most of Eastern Siberia. In the city of Yakutsk, various museum and scientific institutions hold collections and exhibits of Quaternary mammals collected at different times in different locations in the Arctic zone of Yakutia. These collections mostly represents the Late Pleistocene Mammoth Fauna, and are housed in the Emelyan Yarosslavsky’s Yakutsk State Museum of History and Culture of the Peoples of the North, the Mammoth Museum, the Geological Museum of Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Department of the Mammoth Fauna study, Academy of Sciences of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic. These collections include woolly mammoth skeletons, other fragments of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and horse carcasses, whole carcasses of steppe bison, cave lion cubs, and other fossil mammals, many bones and teeth of various mammals of the Mammoth Fauna. The study of these fossil mammal remains allow identification of features of their anatomy and morphology, as well as reconstruction of the ecological conditions at the time they were alive.