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Ch. 10: Elephants Mammoth Mastodon

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EVOLUTION OF ELEPHANTS 343
tionally rich in this respect. A mammoth tusk found here in 1605 is suspended in the choir of the Michaeliskirche at Hall; this is the earliest Suabian find certainly known, although Cuvier had heard or read of a tusk found in 1494. By far the most important of these discoveries was that of the nearly complete skeleton of a mammoth found August 6, 1910, in the rubble of Steinheim-on-the-Murr, of middle Pleistocene age. A careful study of the position of the separate parts of the skeleton led to the conclusion that the mammoth had not died on the spot, but that its dead body had been borne down by the river, and had stranded on a gravel bank, where it was gradually buried beneath the sand deposits. The bones were yellowish in colour and had lost nothing of their form; the tusks were also quite per­fect as to form, but in structure they had suffered more than many others from the deposits of this region. The chief dimensions of the mammoth are given as follows:
Doctor Dietrich of Berlin has bestowed the name Elephas primigenius Fraasi, Dietr., upon this species of mammoth as characteristic of the Württemberg type, and in honour of palaeontologist Prof. Dr. E. Fraas of Stuttgart, who died in 1915.*
The curious superstition that illness would befall any one who unearthed the complete body of a dead mammoth is prevalent among the Lamuts of northeastern Siberia, al­though they do not hesitate to take off and utilizeUhe tusks wherever these may be found. This probably goes to prove the rarity of such remains in a relatively perfect state and it
*0. W. Dietrich, "Elephas primigenius Fraasi, eine schwäbische Mammutrasse," Stuttgart, 1912.
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