New video shows live woolly mammoth crossing a river ... or does it?

Outside of those Ice Age movies, woolly mammoths have been extinct for millennia, but that doesn't stop some people from thinking they're still hanging around somewhere. Now a new video from Siberia seems to show one casually crossing a river ... maybe.

The video apparently comes courtesy of a government engineer who was surveying for road construction in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia last summer when he spotted something interesting in the river and turned his camera on it.

The video is only 10 seconds long, but it does show an animal that seems to be furry and seems to have a trunk walking through the water. Paranormal guru and All News Web mastermind Michael Cohen claims copyright on the video, and presents it as irrefutable evidence that mammoths aren't extinct after all.

"Rumors of a handful of mammoths still kicking around in the vast wilderness of Siberia have been circulating for decades and occasionally sightings by locals have occurred," Cohen told The Sun. "Siberia is an enormous territory and much of it remains completely unexplored and untouched by humans."

Cohen's got a point there, but that doesn't mean there aren't holes to be poked in the video. Why is it only 10 seconds long? The animal clearly wasn't out of view yet, so why not film more? And why didn't the cameraman want to move closer if he was seeing something so extraordinary? And why the months between the filming of the video and the release of it? Plus, if you look closely at the legs, something weird is going on with that water.

So, is this really a mammoth? Is it a bear with a fish dangling from its mouth? Or is it just someone hoping to snag a few bucks off a little CGI?

(via Huffington Post)

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