The Gift of the Mammoths

This year I gave myself a birthday in London as my gift. Shortly after midnight on 30 June, a friend gave me the gift of mammoths. I had been looking at different exhibits in town, trying to decide which ones I wanted to visit (all of them) on which days (harder to decide). The Natural History Museum in South Kensington has an exhibit titled, "Mammoths: Ice Age Giants"which is a complete misnomer since the exhibit itself continuously reiterated that Mammoths lived for thousands of years and most often on grassy planes - not ice. I digress, the admission price is £10, and I was feeling a bit put out about that, so he wired me the money for the ticket as a birthday gift. And I went. And it was fabulous.

I learned:

• Mastodons and Mammoths are not the same, though quite similar
• Neither of the above are ancestors of Elephants, but distant cousins
• Deforestation causes a lot of animals to become endangered - ironically, it was FORESTATION that assisted in the extinction of Mammoths; as ice melted, trees started to pop up everywhere, ridding the large tracts of grassy plains that served as the mammoth's food and living space 
• pigmy mammoths existed, and pigmy elephants still exist today and they were/are adorable (though not puppy sized, sorry John Green)
• Musk ox fur is the closest we can get to imagining what wooly mammoths felt like (surprisingly soft)
• wooly mammoths were smaller than African elephants (I always thought that mammoths were... well, mammoth - but they were on the smaller end of the spectrum)
• Colombian mammoths, on the other hand, were freaking behemoths
• Waco, Texas has a mammoth burial site where scientists have learned how similar mammoths acted to elephants in herd situations. They are all huddled around the young, and it would appear they were trying to protect them from an oncoming flood, but were obviously unsuccessful.

The mastodon (above) was shorter and stockier than mammoths

Other things at the Natural History Museum that I enjoyed were the plentiful taxidermic animals (particularly the birds):

The curiosity cabinets are also a continual favorite of mine. There are several at the British Museum, but even more at the Natural History Museum. A brief history lesson: back in the Age of Enlightenment, well educated men were really into this thing called empiricism. They collected crap to look at because it proved it existed, and they brought back samples from their travels and put them in boxes. These were the curiosity cabinets, and the beginnings of museums. Indeed, the Sloane Collection and the items you can find at the British Museum are from the very first museums. It's incredibly antiquarian and my historiography professor completely scoffed at me about being into antiquarianism ("It's a collection, it's not real history! You don't collect history!" ((paraphrasing here)), but I think I like it more just because he teased me for it, actually.

Anyway, in the curiosity cabinets, I saw raw, unpolished opals. They are kinda my new favorite gem:

Other things of note: GIANT PREHISTORIC SLOTHS, and Glyptodon.

I think GIANT PREHISTORIC SLOTH is pretty self-explanatory; Glyptodon is a prehistoric relative of the armadillo that was about the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle. 

All told, pretty great day of learning. There's a whole wing of dinosaur skeletons that I didn't even get to, and I'll definitely be heading back to this place before I head back to the states. For now, I'll leave you with a joke.

Joke of the day:

Why did wooly mammoths go extinct?

They slowly became irrelephant.