Lyuba Mammoth Views
Only Lyuba's hair and toenails were missing when Siberian reindeer herders found her carcass in May, 2007, washed out from the frozen permafrost along Yuribey River in Siberia. Since then, her body, tiny tusks, internal organs and even the content of her stomach have been a wellspring of new scientific insight into mammoths and life in the ice ages.
There is no question at this point it is the best preserved, most complete wooly mammoth specimen ever found, said Daniel Fisher, an internationally renowned mastadon and mammoth expert at the University of Michigan and one of the first scientists to examine Lyuba. He is the curator of the exhibit, which is scheduled to tour ten other cities around the world after leaving Chicago.
This almost perfectly preserved frozen carcase of a one-month-old female Mammoth calf was discovered by a reindeer herder in the remote Yamal-Nenets region of Siberia in May 2007. An ear and part of the tail were missing, perhaps as a result of the body being scavenged by wolves before it was frozen, or perhaps as a result of the corpse partially thawing out before the herder found it. The baby Mammoth was named Lyuba, the name of the herder's wife.
It had been studied in Japan and several casts of the animal have been made. This calf is extremely important as it represents a healthy animal. Previous finds of baby Mammoths such as Dima were corpses of animals that were malnourished or ill when they died. Poor Lyuba got stuck in a muddy pool and drowned, so perfectly preserved was this specimen that scientists were able to learn a lot about Mammoths and their young.
Lyuba Mammoth Images
.JPG "lyuba mammoth")
