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.
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Woolly mammoths inhabited Eurasia and later North America for hundreds of thousands of years. The species went extinct on the mainland about 13,000 years ago – on some arctic islands several millennia later.
“Nun cho ga” is an incredible scientific discovery, said Grant ZaZula, a paleontologist at the agency responsible for broadcasting Global News. Hair and skin were protected. “If you look at his feet, he has tiny little nails and toes that haven’t fully hardened yet.” She is about 140 cm tall. Preliminary investigation revealed that she was about a month old when she died.
“She has a trunk. She has a tail. She has tiny little ears. She has a small arm at the end of her trunk that she can use to grab grass,” said Zazzula. “She is perfect and beautiful.”
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)
