Vol. 6 Issue 12Vol. 6 Issue 12 1515Meet Vika, a massive male steppe
mammoth skeleton displayed at the
opening ceremony of Serbia’s
Mammoth Park earlier this year.
The remains were uncovered at
Drmno coalmine, about 100km east
of Belgrade, in 2009. Since then,
seven more mammoths have been
discovered in sites nearby.
“It’s extraordinary to have this
animal crouching, head upright,
tusks pointing forward. It’s just
incredible to think this thing is at
least half a million years old,” says
Prof Adrian Lister of London’s
Natural History Museum. “It must
have died in shallow water and been
rapidly covered over.”
Steppe mammoths were an
evolutionary predecessor of the
better-known woolly mammoth, and
much larger. Vika would have been
about 4m tall and weighed nearly 10
tonnes, whereas “the woolly
mammoth was no bigger than a
modern elephant, sometimes even
smaller,” says Lister.PHOTO:^ GETTYMammoth find