Preserved brain of the Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach 1799)) from the Yakutian permafrost

The mummified brain of a pleistocene woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) compared with the brain of the extant African elephant (Loxodonta africana)

“…This volume decrease appears to be the result of dehydration during the long‐term mummification of the tissue in the permafrost. In contrast, the dura mater appeared to have shrunk minimally in comparison with the brain, probably because it was constituted of connective tissue composed mostly of collagen fibres (Kharlamova et al, ). Even so, a direct comparison with the African elephant brain (Fig.…”

“…1, olfactory bulb; 2, olfactory tract; 3, interhemispheric fissure; 4, temporal lobe; 5, cerebral peduncle; 6, pons; 7, cerebellar hemisphere; 8, cerebellar vermis; 9, damaged olfactory tubercle of the Yuka woolly mammoth specimen. (A–C are reproduced from Kharlamova et al, , with permission from Elsevier Science Publishers.) Scale bar = 5 cm in C (applies to A–C) and F (applies to D–F).…”

“…1, olfactory bulb/olfactory bulb and tracts (these were damaged in the Yuka mammoth specimen), 2, cerebral cortex, gray matter; 3, white matter of the cerebral hemisphere; 4, lateral ventricle; 5, third ventricle; 6, cerebral aqueduct; 7, fourth ventricle; 8, corpus callosum; 9, caudate nucleus; 10, internal capsule; 11, putamen; 12, piriform cortex; 13, rhinal sulcus; 14, amygdala; 15, hippocampus; 16, optic chiasm; 17, dorsal thalamus; 18, cerebral peduncle; 19, lateral lemniscus; 20, superior and inferior colliculi; 21, cerebellar hemisphere; 22, cerebellar vermis; 23, middle cerebellar peduncle; 24, medulla oblongata (degraded in the Yuka mammoth specimen); 25, falx cerebri; 26, anterior lobe of cerebellum; 27, posterior lobe of cerebellum; 28, flocculonodular lobe; 29, nodule. (E1 was adapted from Kharlamova et al, , with permission from Elsevier Science Publishers). [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.…”

“…Similarly, frozen woolly mammoth mummies have revealed only featureless masses of nervous tissue remnants (Kreps et al, ). The Yuka woolly mammoth brain examined in the present study (Kharlamova et al, ) is a unique specimen, as the state of the mummified brain preserved in the Siberian permafrost allowed us to describe both the external morphology and internal structures using computed tomography (CT) imaging techniques. This in turn provides the opportunity to compare the brain morphology of the extinct woolly mammoth with the extant African elephant.…”

Probing the proboscidea: Lessons from the past

“…Members of this taxonomic group were first observed during the Paleocene epoch (65-55 mya), with adaptive radiations occurring during the Eocene (55-34 mya) and Oligocene (34-23 mya). The mummified remains of several individuals have been recovered and analyzed, yielding a wealth of information about this now-extinct species (Kharlamova et al, 2014(Kharlamova et al, , 2015Palkopoulou et al, 2015;Papageorgopoulou et al, 2015). The only living representatives of this once-successful mammalian order are the elephants (Fig.…”