Mammuthus Frugalitus Barcelona‘s New Mammoth Museum by El Staff

Usually we do these investigative reports together as an equipo. We explore our urban habitat whilst drinking beer from latas – that’s why this section bears the title Veni Vidi Imbibi. Its goal was to reawaken our senses, to discover the uncanny in the familiar, to slice open Barcelona’s underbelly and read the city’s future from its intestines. But this time not a single soul could be bothered, neither the publisher (“please leave a message...”) nor the friend (Red Rocket until 6 o’clock – no way) or the boy (mmmh, surry). Pathetic alibis produce bad karma, chicos. You’ve missed an incredible hour of 100,000-year-old tusk-touching for 5 pavos (with library card. It’s 7.50€ without, children under six go in for free, older kids pay 3.50€.) However, it’s not too late for the rest of you. The show is on until at least June.

But let’s rewind: One fine day on a walk from the Mercado down Montcada towards Princesa, a 4-meter-tall, furry quadruped appears to my left at the back of a courtyard that had been closed off for years. The swell is crossed and next to fluffy mummy appears a downy mini with buttercups in his trunk - smiling. Ice Age wasn’t bad, but this one is really good: Only a stone’s throw away from Picasso and the DHUB, Barcelona now houses a mammoth “park”. I had hoped the Hotel Vela would be swept away by the rising sea before the proboscideans left their Siberian permafrost soils, but you have to make do with what you’ve got - and in this case it is an “Amazing trip to the Ice Age: the authentic mammoths, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave bears, the bisons,... They have been waiting 100,000 years for you!” You bet they have!

The tasteful design and inspiring tonality of the promo material [see photo] wins you over at once. An angry macho mammoth in front of a frozen Sagrada Familia, and, upon turning it over, “You are invited to visit a unique Museum-Theater: “The Mammoth’s museum of Barcelona”. Only here do the visitors get a "unique opportunity to touch teeth and tusks of mammoth, hold in their hands a woolly rhinoceros horn and even see mammoth in real size." And despite the fact that there is no theater (they might mean a guided tour), it was a mind-gobbling experience to stick my hand into a several-thousand-year-old tusk and to hold the eight-kilo mandible of a Mammuthus primigenius. Most interesting are their teeth, roughly of the size of your hand, with roots that would make ratoncito Pérez faint. I gazed into the abyss of their crania (with amazingly little space for the brain, but an impressively large “air bag” against the cold), inspected their bone marrow (looks just like bone marrow), dissected their one-centimeter-thick skin (gross!) and, finally, was offered mammoth hair to make a pillow out of (because I’m blonde and it was the guide’s birthday). But, petty machismo aside, it was shocking to learn that you are not only allowed to grope and hold all of these prehistoric artifacts, but that most of them “se venden”. Birthday-boy informed me that a German had recently bought an entire mammoth skeleton for a five-digit amount, the ivory tusks are sold by the kilo (the price varies according to quality, but calculate roughly 500 Euros/kilo), and the ivory necklace with matching ring in the glass cabinet will set you back 150€.

Even ignoring the 7.50 Euro admission, which is pretty high considering the space has roughly 200m2 with nine skeletons and replicas on show (that is, until the two sabertoothed tigers arrive in a couple of weeks), this is not so much a museum as it is mammoth business! Now their website artmamut.es makes sense. It doesn’t explain too much to little Jorgito about the Pleistocene tundra and the species that populated it, but it does sell ivory figurines, jewelry and chessboards. “It’s all certified, 100% mammoth,” I’m assured by my guide. “The company manages two museums in Russia, one in Saint Petersburg, and one in Moscow.” The ivory arrives mostly from Yakutia, a remote republic in northeastern Siberia.

There are many things that are very special about Yakutia, also called the Sakha Republic. It is, sizewise, the largest sub-national governing body in the world (3 mio km2) but not even one million people live there. Large parts are permafrost soils that are defrosting as the globe warms up and - surprise, surprise - after a good rain shower you can pick up mammoth tusks in Yakutia like you can mushrooms in the Pirineos. An estimated 150 million animals from the Pleistocene Epoch are stuck in Siberia’s frozen earth. In fact, there are not enough people to gather all the ivory that surfaces, and large amounts go to waste. With the global ivory trade ban of 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Republic two years later, this trade is booming. Most of it is shipped off to Asia, but Europe gets its fair share, too.

And here we are, back in Barcelona, where we now “get a unique opportunity to touch teeth and tusks of mammoth”. What about a tuskpicking trip to Siberia next month? Actually, we do not need to travel that far. In June 2008, four hundred remains of Pleistocene animals were found in Can Guardiola de Viladecans, Catalunya, Spain. They are currently being restored at the Centro de Restauración de Bienes Muebles de Cataluña. Does anyone want to come?