the bone- and wood-bearing sediments described by Baron von Toll consist of both glacial, Saalian and Weichselian, and interglacial, Eemian and Holocene, sediments. For example, Baron von Toll's alder tree was found in Eemian sediments, which are about 114 to 130 thousand years old. The vertebrate fossils occur in sediments that range in age from 114,000 to less than 8,000 BP. Baron Eduard von Toll was among the first to report in detail about the abundance of Pleistocene fossils found within Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island. Under a peat composed of water mosses covering what he described as "perpetual ice", now known to be permafrost, Baron von Toll found fragments of willow and the bones of post-Neogene mammals, like the shoulder-bone of a saber-toothed tiger. He also reported having found in a frozen, sandy clay layer and lying on its side, a complete tree of Alnus fruticosa in length, including roots, with leaves and cones adhering. Unfortunately, his reports have been frequently either misrepresented or badly garbled by popular accounts of his findings. For example, various authors, i.e. Dr. Digby and Dr. Kropotkin misreport this tree as being high. Other publications, i.e. Fingerprints of the Gods and Earth's Shifting Crust not only incorrectly state that this alder tree is high, but also they also repeat fictional claims from unreliable sources that this tree was either a "fruit tree" or "plum tree" and had "green leaves"and green fruit" still attached. Lacking modern radiocarbon dating techniques, Baron von Toll assigned this tree and other fossils to single "mammoth period". As discussed above, more recent geologic research and radiometric dating of these fossils and the sediment containing them has found that they are from different layers of Middle to Late Pleistocene glacial and interglacial sediments. Climate The Cape Shalaurova meteorological station, which lies on the southeast coast of Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, at 73° 11' N 143° 56' E provides climatic data for this island. The mean precipitation is 184 mm/year as calculated for a 7-year period between April 1994 and September 2000 as calculated from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The heaviest precipitation, about two-thirds of the yearly total, occurs between June and September. As calculated from the same data for the same period of time, the mean temperature at Cape Shalaurova is . January is the coldest month with a mean temperature of and August is the warmest month with a mean temperature