Discover Siberia

Almost perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth Lyuba will make its U.S. debut next spring at the Field Museum as part of a “Mammoths and Mastodons” exhibit. Exhibit scheduled to run from March to September. Lyuba will be encased in glass that will afford viewers a 360-degree look.

About Lyuba

Lyuba is a female woolly mammoth which died 40,000 years ago at the age of one month. Discovered on a mudflat beside a northern Siberian river in May 2007 by reindeer breeder and hunter Yuri Khudi in Russia’s Arctic Yamal Peninsula, it was named “Lyuba” after the discoverer’s wife, what in Russian means “love”. She weighed 50 kg (110 lb), was 85 centimeters high and measured 130 centimeters from trunk to tail.

Upon finding, the calf was remarkably well-preserved (remained 98%) through 40 millennia buried in permafrost. Lyuba is believed to have suffocated, from inhaling mud as she struggled to get out of a raging river. The clay-like substance that likely suffocated her also “pickled” her, preserving the little mammoth in a nearly pristine state.

One of the scientists pointed out her nostrils and the fingerlike tip of her trunk, useful for grabbing vegetation. Lyuba has a round mass of fatty tissue on her neck, something researchers never knew about mammoths and also a clue to how the beasts survived in the Arctic.

Her skin and organs are intact, and scientists were able to identify milk from her mother in her stomach, and fecal matter in her intestine. While previously discovered mammoth specimens, who are less well-preserved than Lyuba, appeared to be starving, Lyuba is the picture of health.

By examining Lyuba’s teeth, researchers hope to gain insight into what caused Ice Age mammals, including the mammoths, to become extinct around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era.

Lyuba is by far the best preserved mammoth mummy in the world, surpassing Dima, a male mammoth calf mummy which had previously been the best known specimen.

Since Lyuba’s accidental discovery in May 2007, her body has been studied exhaustively in Russia and Japan, a process followed by National Geographic cameras. Take a look…

Content credit to Wikipedia.com and Chicagotribune.com