First I would like to mention briefly, how I became interested in the ecology of the muskox. Heinrich Walter was a Professor at the Botanical Institute of the University of Hohenheim near Stuttgart, SW Germany. He has discovered the climate diagram. When he was retired, I used to visit him in his home in Hohenheim. And we used to talk about plant ecology and the mammoth fauna. I also gave him then articles (in Russian) about paleontological research on the mammoth fauna in Russia, which he used in his last books.

I asked him: In what kind of a climate has the woolly mammoth lived in the Far North? He told me: "The muskox is a large animal. It is able to live in the Far North, even in northern Greenland, where it is very dry. Northern Siberia and northern Canada are very large. So there is much fodder. In the Far North, the first frost in autumn preserves the nutrients, like protein, in the aboveground parts of the plants. So the grazing animals will have up there very nutritious fodder during the whole winter. Thus, the woolly mammoth must surely also been able to live up there in an arctic climate. The mammoth has lived in the Far North, just like the reindeer and the muskox of today."

Is that true? Where is the muskox living today? Where has it lived, before man killed off most of them with his firearms? How far north? Why is the muskox able, to live up there? How much must it eat and drink? How much energy and dry matter does the muskox need in summer and in winter, to maintain its body weight? How much fodder is growing up there on the arctic tundra and polar desert? How much protein do the plants on the home range of the muskox contain, especially during the long arctic winter? And how much of this fodder is the muskox able to digest? Where is the muskox able, to live up there? And where not?

Why is the muskox able, to survive up there the arctic winter, where other animals will freeze to death? Why is the muskox able, to live in the Far North in the deep cold? Why is it able, to endure in winter the blizzards in the Far North, where there are no wooded areas, wherein it could hide? How thick and how warm is its hair coat in summer and in winter? How does it find its food in winter, when the best feeding-areas, in the lowlands, are drifted over with hard snow?

Would the elephant (or mammoth) be able, to live on the arctic tundra and polar desert, just like the muskox of today? Has it lived in the Far North in ice and snow, just like the reindeer and the muskox of today? How long would the 6.4-ton elephant be able to live up there, if it tried to graze as fast as one muskox, or as fast as two muskoxen?

In the next volume of this series of the Mammoth Fauna, I shall also study the ecology of the bison. Together with the muskox and the woolly mammoth, also large herds of steppe bison have grazed. In Siberia, they have lived up to about 78°N, up to the northern tip of Taimyr Peninsula. Mammoths, bison, and wild horses were then in northern Siberia and Yukon/Alaska the most numerous large mammals. Muskoxen and reindeer were usually only few in number. This also shows us something about the plant-cover, on which they were living then: Not on arctic tundra or polar desert, but on fertile zonal grasslands, on meadow steppe and forest-steppe.