Environment

'Pickled' baby mammoth Lyuba gives glimpse of Ice Age

by Amy Judd | April 21, 2009 at 01:52 pm

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A 'pickled' baby mammoth, called Lyuba, was found very well preserved after she was killed in a swamp about 40,000 years ago. She is so well preserved that she will be able to give scientists a glimpse into life in the Ice Age. It is thought she became trapped in the mud and died.

Although she was found in 2007, she will be featured on the National Geographic May edition, and the show Waking the Baby Mammoth this Sunday on the National Geographic channel. It is thought she is the best preserved mammoth ever discovered.

All her skin and internal organs are still intact, and even traces of her mother's milk has been found in her stomach. She has some bite marks on her, most likely from village dogs.

She has coarse hair on the outside, hence the name 'Woolly Mammoth', and they walked on the planet in Eurasia and western North America about 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. The clay and silt in the swamp is what pickled her intact.

"What's most remarkable about the find is that Lyuba is so well-preserved," says Richard Stone, author of Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant, who was not part of the project. "That suggests there are plenty of outstanding specimens locked away in the permafrost icebox."