The 40,000 year old remains of an infant woolly mammoth were found on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia. At 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide, it is the same size as the elephant orphans I've met in Kenya. Similar to some of their stories, this small babe accidentally got caught up in a river, but rather than being swept away in the currents and orphaned, this one drowned, leaving her mother behind to grieve. Going even farther back in time, her story is similar to other African elephants through the ages. The wolly mammoth's ancestors migrated from Africa to Siberia about 3.5 million years ago. Yet for all the similarities between prehistoric mammoths and the elephants of today, there are still many differences. Scientists are trying to discover what those distinctions are, and this infant's remains, which are nearly perfectly intact, are providing valuable insights.
National Geographic has covered this prehistoric pachyderm story in three formats: television, magazine, and on-line.
Television: Waking the Baby Mammoth
Airs on Sunday, April 26th 2009 at 9pm on the National Geographic Channel. Check back on their site for rebroadcasting dates/times after the premier.
Here is a 4.5 minute video clip from the program, dramatizing what it was like when the infant mammoth's body was discovered out on the frozen tundra by a reindeer herder and his sons in 2007.
If you're reading via RSS or email, click here to watch the video.
There are more videos and all kinds of interactive content that you can view on the show's overview page. National Geographic Channel: Waking the Baby Mammoth.
Don't have an upgraded cable television plan that includes National Geographic Channel? Me either. But this is such a neat story that they also covered it in the May 2009 issue of their magazine.
Magazine: Ice Baby by Tom Meuller
May 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine.
You can read the full article on-line by clicking here.
Also, the photos by Francis Latreille are quite remarkable. Click the image below or this link to view the entire photo gallery.
It's astonishing how anything survives in Siberia, with its cold permafrost that is so severe that this 40,000 year old body could survive relatively intact. So this was quite a find for our scientists who were able to gain better insights into this long-extinct species. (It was also an interesting find for a thief who tried to sell the mammoth body for snowmobiles and food, before the authorities were able to track it back down and reclaim it.) She is the best preserved specimen on record. Even her eyelashes were still there. The full story explains how the scientists determined her cause of death, and more curiously, what caused her miraculous preservation.
Hopefully, our current species of elephants won't become extinct like their ancestors the mammoth.