(OTTAWA) Workers in the Klondike goldfields in Canada’s Far North have made a rare discovery: the mummified remains of a nearly complete baby woolly mammoth.
Posted at 6:13 p.m.
It “is magnificent and it is one of the most incredible mummified animals from the Ice Age discovered in the world”, assured in a press release the paleontologist Grant Zazula, enthusiastic at the idea of finding out more about it soon. this baby, probably a female baptized Nun cho ga for “big baby animal” in the native language, and whose skin and hair are intact.
The remains were found by digging the permafrost south of Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory, bordering US Alaska.
The animal is believed to have died over 30,000 years ago when the area was roamed by woolly mammoths, wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.
It is the first nearly complete mummified mammoth in such a good state of preservation found in North America. Part of the remains of a baby mammoth nicknamed Effie had been found in 1948 in an Alaskan gold mine, and a 42,000-year-old mummified specimen in Siberia in 2007, nicknamed Liouba, and the same size as the last discovered.
The Yukon Territory is known around the world for its fossils of Ice Age animals, but “mummified remains with skin and hair are rarely unearthed,” the Yukon government said.