This mammoth, probably a female baptized “Nun cho ga” for “big baby animal” in the native language, would have died more than 30,000 years ago.
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Rare discovery in the Canadian Far North. Workers have found the mummified remains of an almost complete baby woolly mammoth. On June 21, a miner found this body “digging the permafrost”assures the press release (in English) published Friday, near the Eureka Creek river, south of Dawson City, a city located in the northeast of the country, in the Yukon Territory and close to the border with Alaska.
He “is magnificent and is one of the most incredible ice age mummified animals discovered in the world”, paleontologist Grant Zazula said in the statement. He is enthusiastic to the idea of soon knowing more about 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 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”said the Yukon government.