Baby Mammoth Discovered in Arctic Russia Perfectly Preserved
Local Russian officials announced on Friday that a reindeer herder has discovered the remains of a baby woolly mammoth in Russia's Arctic.
The herder found the one-month old pachyderm peaking out of the permafrost, much like the discovery of a 40,000-year-old mammoth calf by a reindeer herder four years ago. The calf, named Lyuba after the wife of the man who discovered her, was almost perfectly preserved, so much so that her skin and internal organs remained intact.
From her remains, scientists were able to determine that her diet consisted of her mother's milk, and that she ate the feces of adult mammoths as a method of building up intestinal flora that would have allowed her to digest leaves and plants. They also found that Lyuba was quite healthy, while the less intact remains of many other mammoths have indicated that they were starving at the time of death.
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The herder who made this discovery claims that the mammoth he found is just as well persevered as Lyuba. An expedition team has been deployed to confirm the "sensational" find.
"If it is true what is said about how it is preserved, this will be another sensation of global significance," expedition leader Natalia Fyodorova said in a statement on the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region's official website.
The mammoth will be unearthed and taken to the regional capital of Salekhard in order to be stored in a cooler to prevent decomposition.
Wooly mammoths became extinct approximately 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era. Scientists believe they lived alongside Neanderthals and early humans.
Scientists have been examining Lyuba to uncover what caused mammoths to become extinct. Thus far, examination has revealed that Lyuba is a descendent from the Siberian mammoths that were possibly hunted to extinction, but were re-colonized in Alaska.
