Mammoth
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Mammoth. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an extinct elephant with enormous tusks much more curved than those of existing species. During a former and colder age this animal used to roam in herds over the plains of Siberia, feeding on the leaves of the spruce and fir tree. Bones of the mammoth have been found in North America from Bering Strait to South Carolina , and in Europe from the Arctic Ocean as far southward as Italy and the Pyrenees Mountains. Early in the nineteenth century a hunter discovered one embedded in the mouth of the Lena River in Siberia. He waited until the animal had become somewhat exposed by the melting of the ice. He then cut off its tusks which he sold for ivory. Although the animal must have been in the ice for centuries, it was perfectly well preserved. Bears, wolves, foxes, and other wild beasts fed on it until a Mr. Adams of the Academy of St. Petersburg, hearing of the remains, took steps to preserve what was left from destruction. He found the skeleton almost entire and a part of the skin on the side on which the animal had lain. Even the weight of this fragment of skin was so great that ten persons were required to carry it to his boat. The tusks were recovered, and the skeleton was mounted in the museum of the Academy at St. Petersburg. This skeleton, from the forepart of the skull to the insertion of the tail, measures sixteen feet four inches. Its height is nine feet four inches. The tusks measure nine feet six inches along the curve, and six feet seven inches in a straight line from the base to the point. Mammoth tusks have been found in great quantities all over Siberia, and have formed an important article of commerce, furnishing the so-called fossil ivory. The mammoth lived in what is known as the stone age of man. Other animals of this age were the cave bear , the cave hyena, and the Irish deer. There is a popular impression that the mammoth was an animal of enormous size. In all probability it was little if any larger than the African elephant. The Siberian peasants had never seen these animals on the surface of the earth, but they had seen their carcasses come up, apparently through the ice. They had a notion that the animals lived in the interior of the earth very comfortably, but that they died whenever they happened to approach the surface. These wild hunters, comparable to our American Indians, gave the animal the name of mammoth, meaning, in their language, a dweller underground. The idea of enormous size is one that white people have attached to the word. As stated, the mammoth was not a tropical animal. It had a shaggy coat, warmer than that of a bear. It lived by cropping twigs of birch, alder, and other shrubs growing in sub-arctic climes. See Ivory ; Elephant ; Mastodon
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a gigantic prehistoric mammal. The first mammoth discovered was found imbedded in ice in 1799 on the shores of the Lena, by a Tungoosian fisherman named Schumachoff. W. Boyd Dawkins, treating of the range of the mammoth in time and space, comes to the conclusion that it existed in Great Britain before, during, and after the Glacial period. Its remains are found in France in "enormous abundance"; there it was contemporary with the Cavemen of the Pleistocene, as is proved by a A 10 spirited engraving of it on a piece of mammoth ivory found in the Cave of La Madeleine, Dordogne; it has been found in nearly every county in England; and, broadly speaking, its range extended "over the whole land of the Northern Hemisphere."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account has the mammoth as a creature of "a former and colder age," and Collier's in 1921 could only place it in the Pleistocene alongside the cave artists of La Madeleine. Radiocarbon dating has since shortened that gap dramatically: a dwarfed population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 4,000 years ago, overlapping with the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Frozen carcasses far better than the Adams specimen have since come out of Siberia — the baby mammoths Lyuba (2007) and Yuka (2010) among them — and the complete woolly mammoth genome has been sequenced from ancient DNA, confirming the Asian elephant as its closest living relative and prompting well-funded attempts to engineer a mammoth-like elephant. The old entries' cooler-headed points still stand: the mammoth was no giant, being about the size of an African elephant, and it did browse shrubs and grasses in a cold climate.
Written for this edition, 2026.