Paleontologists announced a rare discovery in the gold fields of Klondike, the far north of Canada, by finding the mummified remains of an almost complete woolly mammoth burial.
Paleontologist Grant Zazola said in a statement that the animal was “a remarkable and one of the most surprising Ice Age mummified animals ever discovered in the world.”
Zazula is excited to learn more soon about this mammoth cub, which is likely a female named “non cho ga”, meaning “small giant animal” in the Aboriginal language, with intact skin and hair.
The remains were found by digging up permafrost south of Dawson in Yukon Territory, on the border with the US state of Alaska.
It is likely that this animal died more than 30,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths, wild horses, cave lions and giant bison roamed the region.
This is the first semi-complete mummified mammoth found in such a good state of preservation in North America.
A part of the remains of a small mammoth named “Effie” was found in 1948 in a gold mine in Alaska, in addition to another mummified 42,000-year-old in Siberia in 2007, of an animal named “Lyuba” that was the same size as the mammoth whose remains were recently discovered.
The Yukon government said the territory is known worldwide for its Ice Age animal fossils, but “mummified remains with skin and dander” have rarely been discovered.