It was known for a long time that the remains of ancient animals were repeatedly found in the area of the village of Verkhny Kurp, Tersk region. And a piece of mammoth tusk, found in the twenties of the last century and now exhibited in the exposition of the National Museum of the KBR, is also from these places. It was said that the locals kept huge bones, fangs, ribs, teeth, vertebrae in the farmsteads, and the latter were cunning for invention! - used as stools. But that all this paleontological wealth is of considerable scientific interest, no one even suspected, and there were no scientists nearby, so to speak.
Quite by chance, we learned that a clay cliff on one of the slopes at the confluence of the Kurp and Sukhoi Kurp rivers, which almost immediately after the village of Upper Kurp, exposed the remains of a tusk. Our visit to the excavation site confirmed that the earth had revealed a part of the skeleton of a representative of the ancient crabbot genus.
The southern mammoth, also known as the southern elephant, is an extinct species of mammals of the elephant family: an animal up to four meters high with screw-shaped tusks of about the same length. This giant lived from 2.6 to 0.7 million years ago. He was the first to leave the African homeland of mammoths and ended up in Eurasia, which two million years ago was distinguished by a temperate climate. To date, 7 relatively complete skeletons of the southern elephant have been found: three of them are stored in Russia, two in Italy, one each in France and Serbia; tusks are presented in a number of museums around the world.
In 2007, the remains of a fossil southern elephant were found in a clay quarry of one of the farms of the Novoaleksandrovsky district of the Stavropol Territory.
And here's another find. The Upper Kurp tusk turned out to be, as it were, "walled up" in clay, which preserved it, cutting off the air access. The landslide opened part of the tusk, deconservation occurred and the bone began to collapse almost before our eyes.
With the help of the senior inspector of the Verkhnekurp nature reserve Dzhabrail Guvazhokov, a great lover of history (“Kabardino-Balkarskaya Pravda” told about his searches), we examined the tusk, the opening length of which was 120 cm, and the entire bed visible to the eye was one and a half meters; the diameter in the center of the opened section exceeded 15 cm.
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Unfortunately, due to the active flow of air, the tusk almost before our eyes began to become covered with a network of small cracks and eventually crumbled into a great many pieces. However, before that we managed to photograph him. And the remains were put in a box and brought to Nalchik to analyze the structure of the bone in order to determine at least an approximate age. Next, we plan to transfer these now scattered pieces to the museum.
Above the exposed tusk, another opened slightly. The most interesting thing is that it has a completely different shape: if the lower one is relatively straight, then the upper one is curved, its length is 170 cm. Irina Belotserkovskaya, head of the nature department of the National Museum of the KBR, who came with us to the place of discovery, believes that two representative of the ancient crabbots, and most likely these are the southern elephants.
But that's not all. Local resident Arsen Sheriev said that as a child, he had already found a small tusk in the same place, just a little lower. Having become interested, he began to dig out the ground. And he discovered almost a whole skeleton of a mammoth, which was kept for a long time in their courtyard (the Sherievs lived literally a hundred or two meters from this place), like other unusual bones, including huge teeth. All these paleontological rarities were lost over time.
This episode, as well as the fact that two tusks located almost side by side, at a distance of some 80 centimeters from each other, belong to different individuals, makes it possible to assume, and with a high degree of probability, that there is a whole cemetery of prehistoric animals in these places. This, by the way, fits into one of the versions that mammoths died simultaneously due to an unexplained natural disaster.
The question of what historical secret is hidden by the Upper Kurp burial ground can only be answered by purposeful paleontological excavations. Whether they will be produced is unknown. After all, if for almost 90 years (recall that the first tusk was found here in 1925) they did not bother to implement them, then there is no particular hope that they will begin in our difficult time - the same National Museum does not have the funds for this, as and specialists. One hope for Moscow, and he became interested - six central television channels sent their correspondents to Upper Kurp, three leading Russian news agencies reported the find, hundreds of Internet sites (including many foreign ones) reprinted this sensational news.