Messerschmidt was a tireless worker and a hypochondriac. He spent seven years in Siberia cataloging its natural wonders, then returned to St. Petersburg to present the Czar, Peter the Great, with an enormous collection of material, nine densely written folio columns and numerous octavos with handwritten notes, and a litany of complaints about his treatment at the hands of Siberian officials.

Messerschmidt was the first person to study Siberian mammoths systematically, but he was not the first to notice them. That honor belongs to Chinese ceremonial books from the 4th century B.C. Apparently, back then there was a brisk trade in mammoth ivory between Siberia and China. The fossil ivory was used to fashion the throne of Khan Kuyuk, a Mongol who ruled China for two years beginning in 1242.

A mammoth tusk reached western Europe through one Jonas Logan, who in 1611 had bought it from Samoyeds on the Pechora River in Siberia. Logan described it as an elephant's tooth. The first mention of a frozen mammoth carcass was in 1692 by Ysbrand Ides, an envoy to China sent by Peter the Great. Ides apparently saw the carcass while traveling to China via Siberia.

Trade in fossil ivory from mammoth tusks continued at a brisk pace for hundreds of years. In the "Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of 1929," Innokenti Pavlovich Tolmachoff calculated that between 1809 and 1913, enough ivory was inventoried at various Russian ports to account for an average of 250 individual mammoth specimens a year.

In some ways, the mammoth can be credited as the first extinct animal. On Jan. 21, 1796, Baron George Cuvier delivered a lecture at the French National Museum of Natural History comparing the anatomy of three species of proboscidians -- African and Asian elephants, and the Siberian mammoth. He declared the last of these no longer existed except as frozen carcasses. Prior to Cuvier's lecture, it had been generally accepted among those few who worried about such things that the Great Chain of Being, as it was called, remained unbroken from the biblical deluge to the present.

Cuvier's discovery was only the beginning of the mammoth's importance in the study of extinction. Most of them disappeared only about 10,000 years ago, with a small vestigial population on Wrangell Island, in southeast Alaska, persisting until about 4,000 years ago. The modern debate has raged over whether the giant land mammals were done in by a rapidly changing climate or by over-hunting by technologically advancing humans. Sound familiar?

The fate of the mammoth, though not exactly a parallel to the modern situation, does offer a parable, at least.

Scientists have toggled back and forth about what happened to the furry proboscidians that once walked the earth, sometimes favoring the concept that their demise occurred at the hands of humans, and sometimes embracing an inability to deal with the climate change that occurred 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. The argument is confused considerably by the simultaneous extinctions of a variety of New World megafauna (science-speak for large animals) including the famous saber-toothed tiger, the giant ground sloth and several others.

A paper published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences might provide a new burst of clarity, however. University of Wyoming anthropologist Todd Surovell and colleagues have constructed a clever statistical model that gradually eliminated proboscidians over the course of 1.8 million years in the face of the expanding range of a technologically sophisticated predator in the genus Homo.

"Spanning 1.8 million years, the archaeological record of human subsistence exploitation of proboscidians is preferentially located on the edges of the human geographic range," Surovell and his two co-authors wrote. "This finding is commensurate with global overkill, suggesting that pre-historic human range expansion resulted in localized extinction events. In the present and the past, proboscidians have survived in areas that are largely inaccessible to human populations."

In other words, as hominid populations grew and migrated, they gradually killed off the proboscidians with each new encroachment, until they delivered the final coup de grace about 10,000 years ago.

African and Asian elephants have survived essentially because humans could not efficiently invade their territory.

"In both Africa and Asia, elephant populations remain most viable in tropical forest (ecosystems) where pre-agricultural humans may have never lived at high population densities," the authors continued.

Mammoths have held an important place in the study of the past, not only because of Cuvier, but also because they were abundant and relatively well preserved.

"Relatively" is the key term. There is a persistent legend the scientists who excavated the famous Beresovca specimen dined on streaks cut from mammoth flanks. In 1902, however, Otto Herz, the leader of the expedition, wrote although some of the cadavers had been preserved, there were no mammoth steaks.

Nearly a century earlier, around 1809, Russian government official M. Hedenstrom visited the New Siberian Islands, where he collected a large sack of mammoth bones still containing marrow. During his journey home, he placed the bones inadvertently too close to a fire. The fat melted. Hedenstrom, who apparently had planned to create a mammoth hair tonic from his find, was deprived of the opportunity to prepare a "pommade a' Mammouth," as he characterized the concoction.

An interesting footnote: The marrow, Hedenstrom wrote, "in spite of its old age," did not stink.

Along the lines of "Jurassic Park," there have been at least two serious efforts to try to resurrect the mammoth over the past 10 years. In September 1997, Kazufumi Goto, a Japanese veterinary scientist, proposed taking further advantage of the excellent preservation of frozen mammoth carcasses. Goto, a genetics researcher at Kagoshima University, tried to use frozen sperm to inject in vitro into the eggs of African elephants, creating first a half-mammoth, then creating a more realistic mammoth over generations by fertilizing hybrid eggs with more mammoth sperm.

Goto did not succeed, nor did another Siberian expedition that tried to obtain enough intact DNA to clone a mammoth.

It turned out Messerschmidt did not fare much better than the mammoth. On his return from Siberia, he married a "lively, wild woman who was quite his opposite," something of a gold-digger -- though not a very good one because Messerschmidt was broke. He believed that he had seen her in a dream while on his expedition. He would probably be diagnosed today with bipolar disorder, and he died in poverty and obscurity in St. Petersburg in 1735.

--

Blue Planet is a weekly series examining the relationship of humans to the environment, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com