BABY MAMMOTH FOUND IN PERMAFROST

A six-month old mammoth, found in the permafrost by a gold prospector, has been taken to Magadan and placed in a freezing chamber of the North Eastern Integrated Studies Institute, writes the newspaper “Izvestia”.

The baby mammoth was discovered on June 23 near the Kirgilyakh. Not a part, not a skeleton, not the hide but a whole mammoth was found. The baby was 115 centimetres long, 104 centimetres high, had a trunk 57 centimetres long and was covered with dark brown hair. You get the impression that the mammoth died yesterday, not nine or ten thousand years ago.

Scientists think the baby mammoth had drowned in a small lake or swamp. This rapid internment created conditions that saved the mammoth’s body from destruction. Found in the loose sediments that contained the mammoth were numerous twigs, bits of the trunks of birch and willow trees, grass and moss. This made it possible to picture the vegetation of the area where mammoths had lived even before doing a special paleobotanical analysis. Geological-morphological data gave approximate time of the death: the end of the last Glaciation period.

When mammoths are mentioned, areas of the north-east and north of Yakutia always come to mind. These areas have provided scientists with many surprises, including the find of a giant Mammoth in 1901 on the bank of Beryozovka river.

The mammoths who lived side by side with our ancestors vanished from the face of the earth ten thousand years ago. Protected from the cold by thick hair, the mammoths stood the rigorous, dry continental climate of that time very well. They were destroyed not by cold but by thaw.

THE MICROSCOPE

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Even the ancients had known that curved mirrors and hollow glass spheres filled with water had a magnifying effect. In the opening decades of the seventeenth century men began to experiment with lenses in order to increase this magnification as far as possible. In this, they were inspired by the great success of other lensed instrument, the telescope, first put to astronomical use by Galileo in 1609.

Gradually, enlarging instruments, or microscopes(from Greek words meaning " to view the small") came into use. For the first time the science of biology was broadened and extended by device that carried the human sense of vision beyond the limit. It enables naturalists to describe small creatures with detail that would have been impossible without it, and it enabled anatomists to find structures that could not otherwise have been seen

The first man, who made and used microscope was Anton von Leeuwenhoek. He was not a professional scientist. In fact, he was a janitor in the city hall in Delft, Holland. He made more than 200 different microscopes, most of which had only one carefully polished lens. With his homemade lenses, he explored all sorts of things and discovered a world never before seen by the eyes of man. He examined milk, water, insects, the thin tail of a tadpole, and many other objects. His discoveries of bacteria, blood capillaries, blood cells and sperm cells made him famous. In 1675 he wrote the description of the microscopic animals that live in water. Leeuwenhoek's microscopes were simple. But his great patience and keen powers of observation brought to light many new facts about living things.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1130