The oldest mummified creature discovered in the Americas was a frozen 35,000-year-old woolly mammoth discovered by a Canadian gold miner.
The mummified infant woolly mammoth was discovered last week in the Klondike gold fields in the Tróndk Hwchin First Nation region in the Yukon region of Canada.
The frozen woolly mammoth was found on the site by miners digging through the permafrost. Elders from Trondk Hwchin gave the mammoth calf the name Nun cho ga, which in Hän means “large infant animal.”
Grant Zazula, the palaeontologist for the Yukon region of Canada, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that “she’s flawless and she’s gorgeous.”
Her trunk is there. Her tail is present. Her ears are really little. She might use the small prehensile end of her trunk to grasp some grass,
Although the Yukon is known for its extensive fossil record of ice period animals, skin and hair-covered mummified remains are extremely rare. The mammoth mummified in Nun Cho Ga is the most complete one discovered in North America.
She appears to be female and about the same size as the 42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth mummy named “Lyuba,” which was found in Siberia in 2007.
Nun cho ga, which was found frozen on the site by geologists from the Yukon Geological Survey and the University of Calgary, is thought to have perished and been preserved in permafrost for more than 30,000 years during the Ice Age.
Nun Cho Ga is the first almost entirely preserved and best-preserved woolly mammoth to be unearthed in North America. At a gold mine in interior Alaska, a half mammoth calf known as Effie was discovered in 1948.
Researchers now have a thorough understanding of the ice age period when Nun cho ga, wild horses, cave lions, and enormous steppe bison all roamed the Yukon.
Trondk Hwchin and the Yukon government have pledged to collaborate in the upcoming months in order to preserve and gain more knowledge about Nun cho ga.
Hmmm