by Carlotta Lombardo
Experts believe it was found in the Yukon Klondike goldfields and has been preserved in the frozen ground for more than 30,000 years. “It is mummified, almost complete, and the first best preserved found in North America.”
Frozen in permafrost during the Ice Age over 30,000 years ago and found virtually intact by gold explorers while digging in the Klondike goldfields in the Yukon, Canada, under their eyes they found a woolly baby mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius Blumenbach), mummified almost whole and darker , thin and wrinkled torso, a prominent tail, the short legs, the deep and pronounced eye sockets, even the hair and skin…” At first I thought it was a buffalo pup — Mudry, 31, of Alberta told The New York Times He: “Then I went out and inspected it and it had a case… I couldn’t find the words.” Several gold mines still operate near Dawson City, and it’s common for miners to find fossilized bones of long-dead animals, while digging through permanently frozen layers of mud, but the find was made by Eureka Creek miners on June 21 Golden Fields of the Klondike, in Trondëk Hwëch, it’s incredible because the animal, found along with a large chunk of frozen earth scratched by the workers’ excavator at work, is the most complete mummified mammoth found in North America.
“The Big Baby Animal”
The elders Tr’ondëk Hwëch gave him the name “Nun cho ga”, the “big baby animal”, in the Hän language. For now, the pup is in a freezer in the Yukon, several hours from the mine where it was found, awaiting further analysis. His study will reveal “incredible details” about the ancient past, even what his last meal was, according to Yukon paleontologist Grant Zazula. A quick examination of the specimen suggests that it is female and about the same size as the 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth “Lyuba,” discovered in Siberia in 2007. “Nun cho ga,” according to geologists from the Yukon Geological Survey and the University of Calgary, however, would have died and frozen in the permafrost during the Ice Age over 30,000 years ago.
The “woolly”, one of the last extinct mammoths
The woolly mammoth is one of the mammoth species that later became extinct in relatively recent times. He lived 200,000 to 5,000 years ago in the Pleistocene in Europe, Asia and North America. A species highly adapted to a frigid climate that evolved from the earlier steppe mammoth. Now its remains offer an extremely detailed look at a time when the woolly mammoth roamed the Yukon alongside wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison. In 2019, miners found yet another type of treasure among the goldfields of the Yukon Klondike: the last Ice Age mummies of a caribou and a wolf cub frozen in the ground for more than 50,000 years. The Yukon is now covered in spruce forests, but during the last Ice Age the region was arid and dusty tundra and features world-renowned fossils of Ice Age animals. A partial mammoth named Effie was found in a gold mine in interior Alaska in 1948. The successful recovery of the “Nun cho ga” was made possible thanks to the collaboration between the Tr’ondëk Hwëch ‘in miners and the Yukon Government’s Department of Environment, the Yukon Geological Survey and the Yukon Paleontology Program. The uncovered mummified remains with a lot of skin and hair are also very rare here. And ‘Nun cho ga’, the large cub, will long be remembered as the most complete mummified mammoth in North America.
July 4, 2022 (change July 4, 2022 | 11:34)
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