RARE MUMMIFIED BABY WOOLLY MAMMOTH WITH SKIN AND HAIR FOUND IN CANADA

Mon 27 June 2022:

The nearly intact mummified remains of a young woolly mammoth were unearthed by miners in the remote Klondike gold fields of Canada.

The calf was given the Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation’s nickname Nun cho ga, which translates to “big baby animal.”

The little tyke, which still had its skin and hair, was described in a statement by palaeontologist Grant Zazula as “beautiful and one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world.”

“I am excited to get to know her more,” he said.

The baby mammoth’s remains were discovered on June 21 during excavation through permafrost south of Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon territory, which borders the US state of Alaska.

The animal is believed to be female and would have died during the ice age, more than 30,000 years ago when woolly mammoths roamed the region alongside wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.

Zazula told the CBC broadcaster that Nun cho ga was probably about a month old when she died, most likely after getting stuck in the mud.

The discovery marks the first near-complete and best-preserved mummified woolly mammoth found in North America.

A partial mammoth calf named Effie was found in 1948 at a gold mine in Alaska’s interior.

A 42,000-year-old mummified infant woolly mammoth, known as Lyuba, was also discovered in Siberia in 2007. Lyuba and Nun cho ga are roughly the same size, according to the Yukon government.

It noted that Yukon has “a world-renowned fossil record of Ice Age animals, but mummified remains with skin and hair are rarely unearthed”.

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