Northwestern Canada has discovered the remains of a nearly complete 30,000-year-old baby-wool mammoth.
The Yukon’s Klondike gold fields contained the baby mammoth, which was frozen in permafrost. Representatives of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in Traditional Territory, the government officials, and representatives of the mammoth’s ancient family, stated that it is the best preserved and complete woolly mammoth found in North America.
According to the Yukon government, miners digging through Eureka Creek’s permafrost found the mummified mammoth on June 21.
Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist, was an associate professor at University of Calgary who helped to extract the mummified mammoth. He tweeted Friday that the project was “the most thrilling scientific thing I’ve ever been involved in, bar none.”
Shugar stated that the mammoth calf, which was miraculously preserved, still had its trunk, hair and skin intact.
Peggy Kormendy, an elder Tr’ondekHwech’in Tr’ondek Hwech’in, stated in a statement that “it’s amazing.” “It was amazing when they took off the tarp.”
Researchers from the Yukon Geological Survey, and the University of Calgary concluded that the female baby died and was entrapped in permafrost over 30,000 years ago, during an ice age. Elders of First Nation Tr’ondek Hwech’in called the calf “Nuncho ga,” which in Han language means “big baby animals”.
“It has been a dream of mine for a long time to meet a woolly mammoth as an ice age paleontologist. This dream was realized today,” Grant Zazula (a paleontologist at the Government of Yukon) said in a Friday statement.
According to researchers, this is the second time that a complete mammoth calf was discovered. In Siberia, in 2007, a separate, nearly-complete infant mammoth was found. Parts of a mammoth calves were discovered in Alaska’s gold mine in 1948, decades earlier.
