Discovery of a mummified baby mammoth in Canada
This image released by the Yukon government on June 25, 2022 shows the baby woolly mammoth specimen found in Eureka Creek, south of Dawson City, Canada.
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Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
On June 22, a gold digger in northwestern Canada came face to face with a strange specimen frozen in the permafrost: an incredibly well-preserved baby woolly mammoth.
The small mammal is over 30,000 years old.
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The picture is amazing.
We see the mummy of a baby woolly
mammoth
lying on its side and curled up.
What is exceptional in this discovery is that the little mammoth is whole, everything is there, the ears, the trunk, the little tail and the hairs.
The skin is intact.
The remains of the animal were found by digging the permafrost with a mechanical shovel in the Yukon Territory, bordering US Alaska.
The prehistoric baby is likely female, and scientists estimate that it must have been frozen more than 30,000 years ago, during the Ice Age.
An exceptional state of preservation
It “
is magnificent
,” enthused Yukon paleontologist Grant Zazula.
“
This is one of the most incredible Ice Age mummified animals discovered anywhere in the world
.”
It is the first nearly complete mummified mammoth in such a good state of preservation found in North America.
The find is reminiscent of a similar mummified specimen found in Siberia in 2007. It was the same size as this baby Canadian mammoth, but was 42,000 years old.
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