Updated on 06/25/2022 at 13:35
- Gold diggers in northwestern Canada have found a mummified baby of a woolly mammoth.
- It is only the second giant cub to be discovered worldwide.
- A paleontologist of competent authority speaks of an “incredible scientific discovery”.
Gold miners have found a well-preserved, mummified baby woolly mammoth in northwestern Canada. The Yukon Territory government and the Trondok Hwachine indigenous people said on Friday (local time) that workers discovered female cubs during a digging in permafrost at the Klondike gold fields on Tuesday. It is “the most complete mummified mammoth found in North America”.
The elders of the Trondic Huacin people named him Nun Cho Ga (in English: big baby animal). Geologists from CA and the University of Calgary suspect that Nun Cho Ga died during the Ice Age and was frozen in permafrost more than 30,000 years old.
Woolly mammoths inhabited Eurasia and later North America for hundreds of thousands of years. The species died out on the mainland about 13,000 years ago – only a few thousand years later on some Arctic islands.
Mammoth Baby was about a month old when she died
Vel Cho Ga is “an incredible scientific discovery,” paleontologist Grant ZaZula told the authority responsible for broadcaster Global News. Hair and skin were protected. “If you look at his feet, he has tiny little nails and toes that haven’t fully set yet.” She is about 140 cm tall. Preliminary investigation revealed that she was about a month old when she died.
The report said that this is the second woolly mammoth cub to be discovered worldwide. In 1948, parts of a giant calf named Effie were found in a gold mine in the US state of Alaska. (dpa/sca)