A baby mammoth, thought to have died 10,000 years ago, has been unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia on the Yamal peninsula. Scientists say this could be the best preserved specimen of its type.
The six-month old frozen female calf is so well preserved that it looks like it died only days ago, with its trunk and eyes still intact. The trunk has a rare notch at its tip, and some fur remains on the body.
"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery."
The mammoth, which weighed 110 lbs. and measured in at 130 cm, was discovered by Yuri Khudi, a reindeer herder, who named it Lyuba after his wife.
Some scientists are hopeful that well-preserved sperm or other cells containing usable DNA could be used to bring mammoths back from the dead. This would involve fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with a modern elephant egg cell that has been stripped of its own DNA.
The woolly mammoth is an extinct member of the elephant family. They once roamed the northern parts of Eurasia and North America, feeding on vegetation such as grasses and shrubs. Its species was first recorded in deposits of the second last glaciation in Eurasia, possibly 150,000 years ago.
The frozen carcass will be transferred to Jikei University School of Medicine in Japan for further
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