BY HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
The contest to name the mammoth skeleton at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas drew dozens of votes from an unexpected place: war-torn Syria.
The support from the Middle East helped one entry, and the local 10-year-old boy who submitted it, win the competition.
Hagop Maknissian , a fifth-grader at Batterman Elementary School in the southwest valley, came up with the name Christopher Columbian Mammoth for the 14-foot-tall skeleton, which greets visitors inside the museum at the Springs Preserve.
When his mother, Vania, found out that his suggestion had been picked as one of three finalists, she contacted friends and family members in her native Syria and encouraged them to join the voting on Facebook.
Vania left Syria when she was 23, but she still has a brother, two sisters and “a lot of cousins” living there. They were eager to vote in the contest and so were their neighbors.
“They were all excited for Hagop,” said Vania, who is of Armenian descent.
The campaign worked. Christopher received more than 75 votes from Syria and won the contest by about the same amount.
Stacy Irvin, curator of education for the museum, said the influx of international votes came as a surprise.
“I’m envisioning bombs going off and, ‘Wait, I have to vote on the mammoth’s name,’ ” she said. “This is definitely the last thing we expected when we started the contest.”
Vania said her family in Syria lives in an area that is “not safe like before” but has been spared from the worst of the fighting so far.
She keeps in touch with her loved ones there by phone, Facebook and Skype, but Internet and phone service has become spotty lately.
Even with the overseas support, Hagop still needed a bit of luck to win the contest. He was one of three people to suggest Christopher, so museum officials drew names to decide who should win the grand prize. One of the people Hagop beat out was Steve Rowland, a paleontologist and longtime professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“We were jumping up and down when we heard he had won,” Vania said.
Irvin said the mammoth contest was such a hit they will probably do the same thing again next October, maybe with their replica of a giant sloth.
The museum will hold an award ceremony on Nov. 10 to present Hagop with a plush mammoth and a one-year pass to any state museum in Nevada. He will also get a special, behind-the-scenes tour of the museum’s fossil collection.
But the part Hagop’s parents are looking forward to the most is the unveiling of a sign with the American-born boy’s name on it next to the mammoth. It will be a proud day for them to see an Armenian name on display at the museum, Vania said.
