It was a young miner, digging through the permafrost of northern Canada in the seemingly Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front loader hit something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields.
What he had stumbled upon would later be described by the territory’s paleontologist as “one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world”: a surprisingly preserved carcass of a woolly mammoth believed to have more than 35,000 years.
“She’s perfect and she’s beautiful,” Grant Zazula, the paleontologist from the Canadian territory of the Yukon, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
“It has a trunk. It has a tail. It has small ears. It has the small prehensile end of the trunk where I could use it to take grass.”
He described the finding as “the most important discovery in paleontology in North America.” With much of its skin and hair intact, officials said the find ranks as the most complete mummified mammal found on the continent.
The woolly mammoth is believed to have been a little over a month old when it died. Stretching 140 cm, it is slightly longer than the only other whole woolly mammoth discovered in Siberia in 2007.
The discovery was made in the traditional territory of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation. In a ceremony earlier this week, the elders baptized the calf Nun cho ga, which means “big baby” in the Hän language.
“It’s amazing,” Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s senior Peggy Kormendy said in a statement. “It left me breathless when they took off the canvas.”
Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nations leader Roberta Joseph said they would try to move forward with the remains “in a way that honors our traditions, culture and laws,” adding that Nun cho ga had “chosen to reveal herself. all of us.”
The words may have been a glimpse into the stroke of luck that facilitated the finding. The call from the mining company arrived on a public holiday in the territory, leaving Zazula struggling to locate someone in the area who could rush to the site to retrieve the find.
He eventually located two geologists in the region. “And the most amazing thing is that within an hour of being there to do the work, the sky opened up, it turned black, the lightning started to fall and the rain started to fall,” Zazula said. . “So if he hadn’t recovered at the time, he would have been lost in the storm.”
Geologists who recovered it found a piece of grass in their stomachs, hinting that the last moments of breeding were spent grazing as it roamed a territory that was then home to wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.
Its almost perfectly preserved state suggests that it may have ended up trapped in the mud before it ended up frozen in permafrost during the ice age. “And that event, from getting stuck in the mud to the funeral, was very, very quick,” he said.
Days after the discovery, the excitement had not yet faded. “It’s going to take days, weeks and months to sink,” Zazula said. “And it will take days, weeks and months working with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in to decide what to do and learn from it.”