Pickled' baby mammoth opens window to Ice Age

[ara87]

A baby mammoth dubbed Lyuba had her brief life cut short in a swamp 40,000 years ago, but the well-preserved specimen will provide the world a window into the extinct creatures from the Ice Age.



Discovered in 2007, the 1-month-old mammoth died suddenly, probably trapped in mud. "She was doing great, very healthy," says paleontologist Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan, part of the international team researching Lyuba. "She just had this terrible misfortune."

Lyuba appears in the May National Geographic and in Waking the Baby Mammoth Sunday (9 p.m. ET/PT) on the National Geographic Channel. She's perhaps the best-preserved mammoth ever discovered: Lyuba's skin and internal organs appear intact, as well as traces of mother's milk found in her stomach. The only damage to the mammoth, which is less than 3 feet tall, are bite marks from village dogs.

Covered in coarse hair, the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, roamed Eurasia and western North America at least 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. Dozens of partly intact woolly mammoths have been uncovered from Siberia's tundra, but Lyuba exhibits remarkable preservation. "She's all there," Fisher says. Preliminary analysis by Fisher and colleagues suggests the clay and silt that swallowed up the baby mammoth effectively "pickled" her.

'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."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...-mammoth_N.htm

[KanadaHye]

Re: Pickled' baby mammoth opens window to Ice Age

http://www.archaeology.org/0801/topten/lyuba.html



What counts as archaeology? It's a question we're constantly asking ourselves when we decide what stories to cover. Basically, any discovery connected to the human past made by people who call themselves archaeologists is considered fair game. And when paleontologists find the remains of our hominid ancestors, we cover that too.

That rule of thumb left this year's amazing discovery of "Lyuba" out in the cold when we assembled our list. A six-month-old baby mammoth, Lyuba was found last May eroding out of a riverbank in Russia's Yamal Peninsula by Yuri Khudi, a Nenets reindeer herder. Russian paleontologist Alexei Tikhonov and French explorer Bernard Buiges (see "Mammoth Distortions") soon learned of the find, and they quickly organized a scientific study of the remarkably well-preserved specimen, bringing in mammoth expert Daniel Fisher from the University of Michigan, among others.

The most complete mammoth carcass every found, Lyuba (named after Khudi's wife) weighs about 110 pounds and is the size of a large dog. X-rays of her body revealed heartbreaking details, like the fact that she had nascent tusks no larger than a human finger. More discoveries are likely to come in 2008, when the baby mammoth travels to Japan for CT-scanning.

Strictly speaking, Lyuba is a paleontological, not archaeological, discovery. But every piece of information she can tell us about her brief life brings us closer to re-creating her world, a landscape she shared with our Paleolithic ancestors.

"X-rays of her body revealed heartbreaking details, like the fact that she had nascent tusks no larger than a human finger." Some mammoth.... heartbreaking