A 50,000-year-old baby mammoth pulled from melting permafrost could be the best-preserved specimen ever found.
Weighting more than 100kg, standing 120cm tall and estimated to have been one year old, Yana is one of just seven mammoth carcasses ever recovered.
One of those was in Canada, while the others were in Russia, including Yana, who was found in Batagaika crater by locals who ‘were in the right place at the right time’.
In this eastern Russian region of Yakutia, bordering the Arctic Ocean, the ground is permanently frozen.
But bit by bit, the mile-deep permafrost is melting, causing the thawing ground to sink and reveal the remains of animals remarkably preserved for thousands of years.
This has earned the world’s largest permafrost crater the nickname – ‘gateway to the underworld’.
‘They saw that the mammoth had almost completely thawed out’, Maxim Cherpasov, head of the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory, said.
‘As a rule, the part that thaws out first, especially the trunk, is often eaten by modern predators or birds.
‘Even though the forelimbs have already been eaten, the head is remarkably well preserved.’
In fact, the ‘unique discovery’ and preservation of Yana is so ‘exceptional’, it’s surprised staff of North-Eastern Federal University where the carcass now resides.
Gavril Novgorodov, a researcher at the museum, speculates Yana ‘probably got trapped’ and was ‘thus preserved for several tens of thousands of years’.
Other prehistoric animals found in this region include a partial, mummified body of a 32,000-year-old sabre-tooth cat, and a 44,000-year-old wolf.
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