Johann Friedrich Adam

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Johann Friedrich Adam, later known as Michael Friedrich Adams and also as Johannes Michael Friedrich Adams, was a Russian botanist born in 1780 in Moscow and who died on 1 March 1838 in Vereya. He came from St. Petersburg and studied medicine there in 1795–1796. From 1800–1802 he traveled across Transcaucasia with Count Apollo Mussin-Pushkin. In 1805 he joined a scientific team attached to Count Yury Golovkin’s failed mission to China; after the mission failed, many scientists stayed in Siberia to continue their work. In 1806, while in Yakutsk, he learned of an almost complete woolly mammoth carcass near the Lena River’s mouth. He led an expedition that recovered most of the skeleton, skin, and about 40 pounds of hair. At the time, it was the most complete mammoth known. He brought the find back to St. Petersburg, where the Adams mammoth is now displayed at the Museum of Zoology. Later he worked as an assistant professor of botany at the Medico-Surgical Academy in Moscow.