Mammoth Museum Yakutsk

Yakutia's permafrost preserves what elsewhere would rot, and the region produces most of the world's mammoth finds - not only bones and tusks but carcasses with skin, hair, muscle and stomach contents. The Mammoth Museum, part of the university and functioning as a research institute as much as a display, holds specimens from those excavations along with woolly rhinoceros, bison, cave lion cubs and horses recovered from the ice, some of them famous finds studied by international teams. The material feeds genuine research on Pleistocene ecology and on ancient DNA, including work connected to proposals for restoring extinct species that are more contested than press coverage suggests. Yakutsk is also the coldest large city on earth, with January temperatures around minus forty and colder, and a separate permafrost kingdom attraction offers tunnels cut into frozen ground. The tusk trade, legal and otherwise, runs through the same region.

What you actually see

• Frozen carcasses - animals with skin, hair and tissue preserved in permafrost.
• The research side - a working institute rather than only an exhibition.
• The other species - woolly rhinoceros, bison, horses and cave lion cubs from the ice.
• The permafrost context - the ground conditions that make the preservation possible.

When to go

June to September for reasonable travel; winter if the cold itself is the point. One to two hours.

Honest expectations

The museum is small and its best specimens are sometimes away on loan or in study. Labelling is largely Russian. Yakutsk is expensive to reach and there is no road in for much of the year. Claims about reviving extinct species are far less settled than they are reported to be.

Nearby

The Permafrost Kingdom tunnels and the Sakha national museum are in the city.