Actually, the workers were looking for gold. By chance, however, they discover a completely different treasure. Namely the second woolly mammoth cub that has been found worldwide. Science is enthusiastic about the find, which has been frozen for thousands of years.
Gold miners have found a well-preserved, mummified baby woolly mammoth in northwestern Canada. The Yukon Territory government and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in indigenous people said on Friday (local time) that the workers discovered the female cub during excavations in the permafrost in the Klondike gold fields on Tuesday. Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) is an extinct species of elephant family.
It is “the most complete mummified mammoth found in North America”. The elders of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people gave him the name Nun cho ga (in English: big baby animal). Geologists from the CA and the University of Calgary suspect Nun cho ga died during the Ice Age and was frozen in permafrost more than 30,000 years old.
Little is known about the lifestyle of woolly mammoths, which inhabited Eurasia and later North America for hundreds of thousands of years. The species died out on the mainland about 13,000 years ago – on some arctic islands only a few thousand years later. This species of mammoth evolved in the transition from the Old to Middle Pleistocene about 800,000 to 600,000 years ago.
Well cho ga is “an incredible scientific discovery,” said paleontologist Grant Zazula from the responsible authority to the broadcaster Global News. Hair and skin were preserved. “If you look at her feet, she has tiny little fingernails and toenails that haven’t fully set yet.” She is about 140 centimeters long. Initial investigations indicated that she was about a month old when she died. It is only the second woolly mammoth cub to be discovered worldwide, the report said. In 1948 parts of a mammoth calf, named Effie, were found in a gold mine in the US state of Alaska.
