The next major mammoth find occurred in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, when a Siberian deer hunter spotted mammoth tusks protruding from an icy cliff along the Bereskovka River, inside the Arctic Circle. The hunter was satisfied with taking the tusks and selling them, but fortunately, the buyer decided to inform the Russian government, which in 1901 sent zoologist Otto Herz and taxidermist Eugen Pfizenmayer from the Imperial Academy of Sciences to investigate. After an arduous four-month journey to the spot, the two scientists were struck with awe by what they found.
“Some time before the mammoth body came into view, I smelt its anything but pleasant odor―like the smell of a badly kept stable heavily blended with that of offal,” Pfizenmayer later recounted. “Then, around a bend in the path, a towering skull appeared, and we stood at the grave of the diluvial monster… speechless in front of this evidence of the prehistoric world, which had been preserved almost intact in its grave of ice throughout the ages.” The 35- to 50-year old male, which had fallen into an ice fissure and suffocated in a subsequent landslide 35,000 years ago, was so well-preserved that its flesh―dark red and streaked with thick layers of marbled fat―looked like freshly frozen beef or horsemeat. “It looked so appetizing that we wondered for some time whether we should not taste it,” Herz later recalled. “But no one would venture to take it into his mouth.”