"Tusks and Fangs"

About exhibition

The Museum of the World Ocean and the Khanty-Mansiysk Museum of Nature and Man present a unique opportunity to learn about the distant history of planet Earth. The exhibition gathers some of the most famous and impressive artifacts of ancient fauna: mammoth tusks, an osteological collection of extinct and living animal species, archaeological finds, and exquisite examples of bone-carving art. Of particular interest to scientists are the tusks of mammals from the mammoth fauna. Formed by the accretion of annual layers throughout an animal's life, tusks are a unique source of information. Studies of their structure provide data on the biological characteristics of organisms and also make it possible to obtain information about past environments and climates, and to identify the key factors of mass extinctions over the last 66 million years. The exhibition project "Tusks and Fangs" is a unique opportunity to tell visitors about the mammoth fauna in the Amber Region. Numerous finds indicate that mammoths inhabited the territory of present-day Kaliningrad Oblast more than 40,000 years ago. For example, the exhibition includes the skull of an aurochs (the primitive wild ox) found on the floor of the Baltic Sea, 27 km northwest of Zelenogradsk. This mammal is one of the ancestors of modern cattle. The osteological collection from the two museums' holdings features bison skulls, a woolly rhinoceros and other unique paleontological specimens. From the Museum of the World Ocean's collections the exhibition also displays fossil teeth of megalodon, Spinosaurus and Mosasaurus. Different aspects of the evolution of marine mammals are illustrated by the skull of an orca (toothed whale), a walrus skull and narwhal tusks. In the exhibition visitors will also be able to "meet" Lyuba — an accurate replica of the mummified remains of the most famous baby mammoth in the world, which lay in the ice on the Yamal Peninsula for more than 42,000 years.