An extraordinary discovery in Canada of a mummified woolly mammoth baby

The mummified remains of a nearly complete woolly mammoth, with intact skin and fur, were found in a gold mine in northern Canada, in one of the great discoveries of these Ice Age animals.

“It’s remarkable and one of the most amazing stuffed animals ever discovered in the world,” paleontologist Grant Zazula was quoted as saying in a statement released Friday by the government of the Yukon Territory, which borders Alaska.

The specimen, a female, was found on Tuesday and named nun cho ja, a “big baby animal” in its mother tongue, and its skin and hair are intact.

His remains were discovered under permafrost, south of Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory.

The animal had died more than 30,000 years ago when the area teemed with woolly mammoths, wild horses, cave lions and bison.

It is the first semi-completed and well-preserved mummified mammoth found in North America. A fragment of the remains of a young mammoth called Effie was found in 1948 in a gold mine in Alaska, and in 2007 a 42,000-year-old specimen, called Lyuba, about the same size as the last discovered, was found in Siberia.

The government of Yukon, an area known worldwide for fossils of Ice Age fauna, asserted that “mummy remains with skin and hair are seldom exhumed.”

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