Pachyderms on Ice

Scientists recently unveiled a newly discovered baby mammoth that had been preserved nearly intact in Siberia's ice. It is the best preserved specimen found thus far. Alexei Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute 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 and of course when we talk about climate change, we must use the knowledge that we will get from them". I guess what he's trying to say is that it just goes to show that cavemen should have been driving more hybrids.

The 6 month old mammoth weighs about 110 pounds. It is about 33 inches tall and is about 51 inches from the tip of the trunk to the hind quarters. One ear and the tail of this 10 - 40,000 year old female appear to have been bitten off by some predator or scavenger. She's been named "Lyuba" after the wife of the reindeer herder who found her.

She will be moved to the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg to join a male baby mammoth found in Magadan in 1977.

This specimen is so well preserved that scientists feel it may well be a treasure trove for the study of the mammoth's genome. Tikhonov scoffed at the idea of being able to clone a mammoth from this animal though claiming that the animal's cells would have been too ravaged by time and the cellular damage caused when the animal's tissues froze.

Personally I'd like to hope that at some point in time it will be possible to do so. It would be interesting to see a living specimen of a creature that so symbolizes the mega-fauna epoch, a period I've always been quite interested in.