The Institute really attacked this problem. To freeze a quarter or half a steer presented a big enough problem – but a whole mammoth!

Some weeks later the Institute went back to Sanderson with the answer: It’s utterly impossible. With all of our scientific and engineering knowledge, there is absolutely no known way to remove the body heat from a carcass as big as a mammoth fast enough to freeze it without large moisture crystals forming in the meat. Furthermore, after exhausting the scientific and engineering techniques, they looked to nature and concluded that there is no known process in nature which could accomplish the feat. So many have loosely claimed that the Beresovka mammoth “fell in a crevasse” or “fell in the ice” or some such nonsense. There is absolutely, positively, irrevocably no explanation in the known processes of nature to explain the quick- freezing of the Beresovka mammoth – concurrently with the muck in which he was suffocated and drowned.

The Institute did tell Sanderson what it takes to do the job, however. First of all, the body temperature of the mammoth must be lowered about 140 degrees Fahrenheit (or 78 degrees Centigrade) from its normal temperature, and it must be accomplished in an absolute outside time limit of approximately four hours. Actually, they concluded, the freezing process would have to take place in an elapsed time of closer to two hours.

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The Institute did not take into account the effect on their conclusions which two other factors would have made: first, the fact that an entire strata of muck was frozen concurrently with the mammoth; and second, the fact that his erection had been preserved by quick freezing. The second of these facts reduces our actual freezing time to far below two hours. All that two to four hours represents is the outer limit of time within which the freezing process had to have taken place for no large moisture crystallization to have formed deep in the meat. The second fact tells us that the freezing time, at least for the entire strata of muck and the outer parts of the mammoth, had to be less than one minute, or perhaps more like half a minute.

The whole process bespeaks of an inhuman, supernatural violence: one foreleg, some ribs, and its pelvis were fractured (Do you realize what it takes to break a mammoth’s foreleg and his pelvic bone!?); he was buried in a sea of muck formed by supersonically moving water, gathering and homogenizing the muck; suffocated and drowned in the muck, and quick frozen in the muck in an utterly impossible sequence of events – but nonetheless the process was performed – then kept frozen and preserved for almost seven thousand years.

Thank goodness for the scientific and intellectual curiosity of the Russian Czar who assigned the scientific team the responsibility to form the expedition into the

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