If you weren’t tipped off by the fact that this video made its first appearance in The Sun, Britain’s worst tabloid, here are six other reasons to disbelieve:

When elephants cross a body of water, they hold their trunks up out of the water. They don't just let their trunks dangle under water. The reason for this is simple: elephants breathe out of their trunks. Hello! If that was really a woolly mammoth, it would have drowned halfway across the river.

 

That is one cold, fast-flowing river. No animal in its right mind would try to cross it. Especially an animal as big and furry as a woolly mammoth. When a woolly animal's coat becomes waterlogged, it loses its insulative power. And when crossing a river, a thick coat is a real liability. That mammoth would be at serious risk of drowning. It would have to be literally a life or death situation for an animal like that to risk crossing that river. 

 

See how the animal is casually strolling? Exactly.

 

A lot of people think this might be video of a grizzly bear. I don't - or at least if it is a bear, it's been copied and pasted into the video. But the scale is correct for a grizzly bear. That animal is about 300% too small to be a woolly mammoth. 

 

The river is shallow. You can tell by the way the rocks have created whitecaps. The water probably isn't more than two feet deep, which would make this animal about five feet tall at the shoulder at most.

 

An animal that size moving across the direction of the current should be putting up at least as much splash as the rocks that are in the actual river. And the splashing should vary as the animal's legs move. Instead, we have one bland white line meant to indicate splashing. Please.

 

I would love to believe that an animal as large as a woolly mammoth could hide in an area as big as Siberia for 4,000 years. But… I just don't. 400 years, maybe. 4,000 years? No way.

 

 

Oh how I long for the days when video footage was considered conclusive evidence. But these days you can create studio quality fakery with just a few mouse clicks. Case in point: footage that recently surfaced which purports to be a woolly mammoth crossing a river in Siberia.