Back to wild
The Przewalski Horse is the last wild horse. The horse is named after the Russian colonel Nikolai Przhevalsky (the name is of Polish origin and "Przewalski" is the Polish spelling). He was the explorer and naturalist who first described the horse in 1881, after having gone on an expedition to find it, based on rumors of its existence. Many of these horses were captured around 1900 by Carl Hagenbeck and placed in zoos. As noted above, about twelve to fifteen reproduced and formed today's population.
The World Wild Fund is supporting the Przewalski Horse project. Przewalski's horses, named after the Russian explorer who first described them scientifically, Nikolai Przewalski, were once native to China and traveled freely across the wilds of the Eurasian steppe covering Russia, Mongolia, and Eurasia. But they were driven to the brink of extinction after Przewalski's 19th- century discovery of the species led to an increase in their appeal. Many were killed or captured and taken to zoos across the world, while others were displaced by human land use. Of the 2,000 Przewalski's horses left in the world today, only 300 live in the wild, having been part of reintroduction programmes first.
Colonel Nikolai Przewalski identified a different kind of horse by using the bone structure of the horse. They are very difficult to catch and there are only a few that exist in the Zoo.
A scientist named Feh first put the horse in a zoo, and then sent them back to the wild, The Causse Mejan landscape in France is quite similar from that in Mongolia where the horse used to live. He spent 6000 hours to do the experiment, to change the nature of the Przewalski horse to attack and fight other horse species. Then Feh took the horse to Mongolia to roam in an area of 13000 hectares grassland once the horse used to live. Feh's project is also known as "Wild Horse Mesh".
There are 37 Przewalski Horse in the project, and they are served as genetic reservoir if their species is under threat of extinction. There are three groups of the Przewalski horse in the plan which has been reestablished by Feh.
If Przewalski's horses breed with domestic horses, they produce fertile hybrids, which has the potential to quickly adulterate the species and undo the work of the project. So, organisers have decided first to place the horses in a fenced- off area to stabilise the population and fend off the risk of losing their gene pool.
The native population declined in the 20th century due to a combination of factors, with the wild population in Mongolia dying out in the 1960s. The last herd was sighted in 1967 and the last individual horse in 1969. Expeditions after this failed to locate any horses, and the species had been designated "extinct in the wild" for over 30 years.
After 1945 only two captive populations in zoos remained, in Munich and in Prague. The most valuable groups, in Ascania Nova, Ukraine, was shot by German soldiers during world war two occupation, and the group in the United States had died out.
Competitions with livestock, hunting, capture of foal for zoological collections, military activities and harsh winters recorded in 1946, 1948 and 1956 are considered to be the main cause of the decline in the Przewalski's horse population. By the end of 1950s, only 12 individuals Przewalski' horses were left in the world. The species is being introduced into their original habitats after 20 years of extinction in the wild, 20 years of the horse being extinct in the wild as the result of hunting, capture and habitat loss. The decline of pasture in Mongolia is mainly because of grazing pressure. The scientists are now discussing with local people about the horses and protect them together.
The discovery of a baby mammoth
A On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuriye River, looking carefully at a diminutive corpse. Although he'd never seen such an animal before, Khudi had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each summer, and this persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily well preserved. Apart from its missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi realised the find might be significant and he knew he couldn't just return home and forget all about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend took him to meet the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuriye River to collect the baby mammoth.
B Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the primary cause of the great die- off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the vegetation. 'We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in their extinction.' says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth expert at London's Natural History Museum. 'In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches closely.' The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the temperature rise for the great die- off. Some say they caused it.
C The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the st Petersburg Zoological Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum's director, was one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued 'the best preserved mammoth to come down to US from the Ice Age', and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi's wife. Tikhonov knew that no- one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely, other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba's anatomy: her milk tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusksamples. Most of these came from the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the other hand, Pleistocene era: the time between roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10.000 years ago to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in st Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three- day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba's trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba's death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well- preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba's premolars and tusks revealed that she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
Recording History
Not too long ago, America's culture was recorded mainly on paper, vinyl and film, and deposited at the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office. Nowadays, the seeds of future history may be flowing in huge volume from Web designers and content providers directly into people's homes, and the Library of Congress and other archivists are trying to create new systems to ensure the information is saved. It's a big job, they say, but also a big opportunity. "We are given an opportunity through the digital medium to create libraries and disseminate knowledge in ways never possible before, and if we make the wrong steps, we can lose not only this opportunity, but also our cultural heritage that's in digital form," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
Records, the Internet, Could Be Future Keys to Our Times. Kahle's Archive is working with the Library of Congress and private industry to preserve a record of the Internet for future generations, and has been saving parts of the Web for five years. Kahle says he knows of "no good [archived Internet] collection pre- 1996" and he feels that's a shame. But, he adds, it is not unprecedented in history. "The early version of whatever media is usually lost," he says. "Early films were recycled for their silver content. Any books from the first 50 years of printing demand a very high price, because they rarely exist. And the library of Alexandria [an attempt to archive collected knowledge of the ancient world] is best known for being burned by three successive governments — first the Romans, then the Christians, then the Muslims."
Planning a Preservation System. Still, archivists don't want to fall behind this time, if they can help it. In December, Congress appropriated $100 million to the Library of Congress to develop a national program to preserve digital information. The effort is about more than just money, say archiving professionals. "The first stage of the plan is to make sure we understand the issues related to long- term preservation," says Laura Campbell of the Library of Congress' Digital Infrastructure Program. "What are the considerations to making sure this content isn't lost to future generations?"
To that end, the Library is consulting with prominent publishers of Internet and digital content, attempting to reach agreement on preservation standards and work out deals for archiving information, says Winston Tabb, the associate librarian for library services. In some cases, the Library is discussing with publishers of copyrighted professional journals, news sites and Webzines, ways that it can assist with archiving their content. Currently, publishers can assert their copyright, store all the information themselves and forbid local duplication and storage by libraries and archives.
Vulnerable Data? At the same time, the Library is conducting what may be the first independent scientific tests on the stability of digital storage formats, starting with compact disks, so that it knows how long it can expect information saved in such formats to last. "We don't see anyone out there doing this kind of study, so it does fill an important niche," says Marc Roosa, director of preservation for the Library of Congress. Such information is important to the Library, the U.S. Copyright Office, and other libraries with growing and aging collections of music CDs, CD- ROMs, DVDs and data stored on writable CDs, that may need to duplicate their collections to save the data.
Experts say the Internet is an even stronger example of the here- today- gone- tomorrow aspect of the digital age. Preservation efforts must begin now, they say, as archivists often cite conventional wisdom that the average life of a Web page is about two months. In recent years, Kahle says, the Internet Archive has taken snapshots of all legally accessible parts of the Internet every two months, so that people in the future will have some idea how it looked and what surfing the Web circa 1996 to 2001 was like. Areas of the Web designated as off limits by site creators, or password protected, are among those not saved during the Internet Archive's automated sweeps. (Some parts of ABCNEWS.com are forbidden to archivists.)
So far, the archive has collected 40 terabytes of information, about double the amount of digital space it would take to store the Library of Congress' collection of text- based material, Kahle says. The archive plans to transfer its data to new hard drives every three years so that the information contained is not lost to decaying digital bits. The digital material accessible through his site's "way- back machine" includes a two- terabyte archive of sites related to the 2000 presidential election, frozen as they were and stored periodically as the election campaign and post- election aftermath progressed. Some pages from the 1996 election also are accessible. Most of the pages from both elections are no longer available elsewhere on the Web in their original form.
Museum of E- Failure - An Amateur Effort to Save the Memory of Failed DotComs. However, reconstructing records for the Web gets even harder the farther back in time you go, meaning already there is a loss of historical information. "If somebody were to try to write a dissertation today about the Web in 1994, say, they would be hard- pressed to find the kind of archival primary materials that they'd want," says Patsy Baudoin, e- journal archiving project manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology libraries.
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