In early February, 2012, a new video in cyberspace claimed to show a blurry live wooly (also spelled woolly) mammoth, an animal scientists think has been extinct for millenniums, crossing a Russian river. According to The Sun, a government engineer who was conducting a survey for a possible new road, filmed the beast in Siberia’s Chukotka Autonomous Okrug area.
Mammoths: The Extinct Animals
It’s believed that these elephantine mammals lived from about 2 million years ago to 9,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, the Pleistocene to the early Holocene Epochs. Their existence is known from their fossils, bones, frozen and mummified bodies and primeval cave drawings found in North America and Eurasia. The herbivorous mammoths, Mammuthus, were adapted to cold weather. They had long, thick hair and undercoats, large ears, a trunk and long tusks in both sexes. The various species ranged in size from about nine feet to over fifteen feet tall. The Wooly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, is one of more than six subspecies. They lived from about 120,000 to 4,000 years ago. Cave paintings of this species have been found in France and Spain.
This mammoth, most likely, became extinct because it couldn't adapt to the climate change, human predators, disease or a combination of the three.
The Astonishing Video: Reactions
Some believers in the existence of cryptids hoped it proved animals thought to be extinct, living fossils like the coelacanth, still survived in remote regions. Other people thought it was a real animal, perhaps a bear with a large fish hanging from its mouth. This would explain its comparatively small size, the fish resembling a trunk and its color. Some people thought video was a blatant hoax, a computer-generated mammoth digitally inserted into an actual river scene. Experts doubted the film’s genuineness. Hollywood video effects artist Derek Serra stated the image appeared to have been deliberately blurred.
The Wooly Mammoth Hoax Exposed
Writer and videographer Lou Petho filmed the mammoth’s background scenery at the Kitoy River in Siberia's Sayan Mountains during the summer of 2011. He was on ten day solo trek as part of a project he's working on about his grandfather's 1915 escape from a Siberian POW camp, walking across Siberia to Budapest, Hungary. His video has been on YouTube since July, 2011. The scenery in both videos is identical. He said he saw deer, sables and bears, but no wooly mammoths.
Mammoth Video: What do you Think?
The videotape, titled “Woolly Mammoth Video from Siberia Faces Credibility Issues,” has a copyright: “Woolly Mammoth © Michael Cohen/Barcroft Media.” There is no date for the copyright; however, summer 2011 is a date given in the article. Petho put the video on the Internet in July of that year. Why did Cohen, who is a paranormal writer, wait until February 2012 to add it to the Internet? Cohen said that it should not be surprising that some mammoths could exist. Rumors of a few of them surviving in the enormous remote areas of Siberia have been circulating for years. There have been occasional reported sightings by locals. Siberia is enormous and much of it remains completely unexplored by humans.
Is the image a wooly mammoth or something else? Judge for yourself: main.aol.com/2012/02/09/woolly-mammoth-videotaped-in-siberia_n_1269116.html
Sources:
Benjamin Radford, TechMediaNetwork, www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/13/woolly-mammoth-video-hoax/?intcmp=trending. Accessed on February 14, 2012
www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/mammoth/. Accessed on February 14, 2012.
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Jill Stefko - I'd rather deal with the paranormal than human abnormal - having dealt extensively with both.
