so cool. i wish my univerysity would pay for NGC

Frozen Baby Mammoth Found in Siberia
MOSCOW — The frozen carcass of a baby woolly mammoth has been unearthed in a remote northern Siberian region, a discovery scientists said Wednesday could help in climate change studies.

The 4-foot gray-and-brown carcass, believed to be between 40,000 and 10,000 years old, was discovered in May by a reindeer herder in the subarctic Yamal-Nenets region.

It has its trunk and eyes virtually intact and even some fur remaining, said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute.

The animal's tail and ear were apparently bitten off, he said.

"The mammoth is an animal that you look at and you see that there is an entire epoch behind it, a huge time period when climate was changing," he said in comments broadcast Friday. "And of course when we talk about climate change, we must use the knowledge that we will get from them [mammoths]."

Woolly mammoths roamed northern Eurasia and North America for tens of thousands of years during the last Ice Age, disappearing about 10,000 years ago.

There is evidence that smaller-statured island populations persisted for much longer, with one group possibly lasting until 2000 B.C.

Tikhonov said the mammoth would be sent to an institute in Japan for further study.



'Pickled' baby mammoth opens window to Ice Age

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.