Russian scientists displayed the corpse of a young mammoth, whose remarkably well-preserved remains were discovered in the Siberian province of Yakutia in June after almost 50,000 years.
According to Russian state media outlet TASS, local villagers discovered the female juvenile mammoth’s body, called Yana, after a permafrost crater deepened.
“We can say it is one of the best-ever found in the world,” Maksim Cheprasov, Laboratory Head of the Mammoth Museum at Yakutsk’s North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU), told TASS.
According to Cheprasov, the infant mammoth died at the age of one and weighed approximately 397 pounds [180 kilograms]. The geological age, according to radiocarbon data, is 50,000 years, TASS said.
The researchers believe mammoth kids grew quicker than horse, bison, and wolf children today due to harsher meteorological conditions at the time.
“They needed to become large in order to endure the harsh winter,” Cheprasov added, according to TASS.
The mammoth remains were discovered in the Batagaika Crater, which has been constantly expanding since the 1960s and has revealed other prehistoric finds such as a horse and bison, according to TASS.
Locals discovered the carcass after a section of the crater collapsed, exposing half of the mammoth. According to Cheprasov, the front half of the body fell into the hole, but the back half, including the hind legs, remained in the permafrost. His colleagues eventually collected the back half.
According to Cheprasov, prior to the discovery of this infant mammoth, six entire mammoth skeletons have been discovered worldwide, five in Russia and one in Canada.
“This is a really unique find, not only for our university and Russian science, but also for the world,” Anatoly Nikolaev, Rector of the North-Eastern Federal University, told TASS.