Kaloneri The Team 2008 in the imposing forest elephant skull remaining in the town hall of Kaloneri. Photo: Kaloneri team
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interview with the Dutch mammoth expert Dick Mol
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The Kaloneri team presents the forest elephant Skull rest in the Town Hall on Kaloneri. Photo: Kaloneri team
Question: Mr. mole, you have established in Greece with Professor Evangelia Tsoukala of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in a skull left with huge tusks of the forest elephant. What is special about this find?
Answer: Greece is very rich in mammal remains from the Pliocene and Pleistocene (Ice Age). This also applies to fossil mammoths. At Milia, Western Macedonia (Greece), I have been working together for several years with Professor Evangelia Tsoukala. There we have excavated in 2006 mastodons (teat teeth elephants) from the late Pliocene. This pachyderm has been almost straight tusks with a length of as much as 502 centimeters!
Just before we started our excavations in the summer of 2006 Milia woman Tsoukala has performed with her team in a neighboring village Kaloneri Notausgrabung. There was at motorway work, a partial skeleton of a Pleistocene forest elephants (Elephas antiquus) destroyed by bulldozers. A portion of the skull along with tusks could be saved.
In summer 2008, we find, which is kept in a school in gypsum cores prepared. On the skull morphology and the straight-tusked I have found that it is a male forest elephant. This type was in the Pleistocene Around 700,000 to 28,000 years before widespread. During the Eem interglacial (about 127000-115000 years) many of these heat-living mammoths have also lived on the Upper Rhine in Germany and England. Trafalgar Square in London was in the Eemian forest inhabited by elephants.
We are working on a scientific report on the occurrence of forest elephants in Greece. This discovery was new and therefore of great interest. We can immediately notice that was broken in our forest elephant Fund in 2006 during his lifetime, the right tusk. Perhaps the animal has had an accident or his tusk is broken in a fight with another bull.
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excavation of the forest elephants of Kaloneri (Western Macedonia) in Greece. Photo: Kaloneri team
question: When, where and how it was discovered the skull of the remaining forest elephants in Greece?
Answer: This forest elephant was unearthed in 2006 Kaloneri, western Macedonia. His exact geological age is not yet known, it is probably late middle or early late-Pleistocene have been. It is a male animal, which - judging by the tusk - had already reached an advanced age.
This discovery is one of the village Kaloneri. The mayor of Kaloneri asked us to issue the skull along with tusks in the new City Hall Kaloneri. We have made mid-December 2008. It is a small but impressive exhibition in the hall of the City Council of Kaloneri become.
Within a week we have set up together with some members of our team of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from the exhibition. Also in
Museum of Milia, which is already well known because of the massive tusks of mastodons, we have worked with the artist Dimitra Labretsa. According to my information last year, it has an impressive reconstruction of the animal's snout Mammut borsoni, of about three million years ago known as mastodons of Milia, customized.
is what we have now also made in Kaloneri. With the forest elephants brought from Holland documentation Labretsa wife has prepared under the direction of myself and wife Tsoukala a very nice picture on a large wall. In addition, we have issued the cranial parts of the forest elephants of Kaloneri.
is very good to see that the right tusk is considerably shorter than the left. The tooth tip is after the break again been used very extensively by the animal. Therefore, the tooth tip is ground flat and polished.
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skull fragment of Mammuthus meridionalis (NESTI, 1825) in the Museum Montevarcchi, Valdarno, Italy. The tusks from mammoths are curved spiral. Photo: Kaloneri team
question: was 2008 for you, the mammoth experts a good year?
Answer: Yes, 2008 was very successful. Not only the North Sea floor between Holland and England has again delivered many new discoveries. In France, I was involved in the excavation of the skull of a steppe mammoth. In Italy I have a very interesting collection with many original study findings may in Turin. Also, two books have come out. Another is almost ready for printing and will be released in March 2009. With many beautiful paintings by Remie Bakker, a Dutch artist from Rotterdam, with whom I have worked for several years.
* Question: Do you have 2009 before a mammoth expert anything special?
Answer: In January I will fly to Yakutia (East Siberia). There I worked in an ice cave at the almost complete carcass of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). A better start for 2009, I could not have me do.
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The questions for the interview, the Wiesbaden-based science writer Ernst Probst, of the Weblogs http://internet-zeitung.blogspot.com and http://wissenschafts-news.blog.de operates.
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