Wooly bully

>> The word on Baby Mammoth

By ADAM GOLLNER

Although they've put out six albums in five years and are the biggest act on Pork records (since Fila Brazilia moved on), the best thing about Baby Mammoth is their name. Mammoth-man DJ Bliss expounds.

Mirror: Any story behind the name?

DJ Bliss: When we was looking for names, there was this encyclopedia that we was looking at, and this heading that said, "10,000 Years Beneath the Permafrost" just sort of jumped out at us.

M: And there was a little picture of a baby mammoth?

B: Yeah, it was called Dima, actually. Because in Siberia, you can find mammoths in the permafrost. Old Russians used to feed them to their dogs. Because the meat had been frozen for thousands of years, they could still eat it. So there was a picture of this little mammoth named Dima.

M: It was preserved in ice?

B: Yeah, in six-foot permafrost. The meat still hadn't decayed because of the ice all around it, which we found quite bizarre. 10,000 years old, and it was still in a similar sort of manner to what it was when it died.

M: When they found Dima in the ice, what did they do to preserve it?

B: I don't know what they did to it, to be honest. They must have treated it somehow.

M: Maybe they pickled it.

B: I think they treated it with wax or something like that.

M: Or they threw it to the dogs.

B: They've probably stopped doing that now because all the old Siberians have finally realized how precious the mammoths are.

M: I recently heard a story about this old scientist who found this 30,000-year-old mammoth frozen in Alaska, and he ate it.

B: Wow. They've just found a fully-preserved mammoth frozen in the permafrost, and what they're trying to do is get the sperm from it, to try to cross-fertilize it with an elephant. They'll isolate the DNA, and breed it with an elephant's, and in eight years time, they'll get an 80 per cent pure mammoth. That's the word on mammoths. :

At JIngxi on Sunday, April 2, 10pm, $12