Collectors make a mint from Arctic mammoths

One day, climate change could cost the earth. For now, it is a nice little earner for Russian hunter Alexander Vatagin.

In Siberia’s northernmost reaches, high up in the Arctic Circle, the changing temperature is thawing out the permafrost to reveal the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoths, woolly rhinos and lions that have been buried for thousands of years.

Private collectors and scientific institutes will pay huge sums for the right specimen, and bone-prospectors such as Vatagin have turned this region, eight time zones from Moscow, into a palaeontological goldmine.

Sydney Morning Herald