Miners have found a well-preserved, mummified woolly mammoth calf in northwestern Canada. Workers discovered the female while digging in the permafrost of the Klondike goldfields, the Yukon Territory government and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Indigenous people said.

It is “the best-preserved mammoth ever found in North America,” they said.

“It’s beautiful and one of the most incredible ice age mummified animals discovered anywhere in the world,” paleontologist Grant Zazula said in a statement from the government of the Yukon Territory, which borders Alaska.

mammoth under permafrost

The specimen, a female, was found on Tuesday and named “Nun cho ga,” “big baby animal” in the native tongue, and her skin and hair are intact.

His remains were discovered under permafrost, south of Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

The animal is said to have disappeared more than 30,000 years ago when the area was teeming with woolly mammoths, wild horses, cave lions and bison.

It is the first nearly complete and as well-preserved mummified mammoth found in North America. Part of the remains of a baby mammoth named Effie had been found in 1948 in a gold mine in Alaska, and in 2007 a 42,000-year-old specimen called Liouba, the same size as the latter was discovered. found in Siberia.

“Mummified remains with skin and hair are rarely unearthed,” said the government of Yukon, a territory known worldwide for its fossils of Ice Age animals.

LITTLE (AFP, dpa)