For the first time in North America, the mummified remains of a woolly mammoth have been found in Canada’s Yukon.
A little after noon on June 21, National Indigenous People’s Day, a young miner working in Yukon’s Eureka Creek, south of Dawson City, was digging up muck using a front-end loader when he struck something, reports CBC Canada,
The young man went to call his boss, and when he arrived, Treadstone Mining’s Brian McCaughan put a stop to the operation on the spot. That miner ended up making the “most important discovery in paleontology in North America,” said Dr. Grant Zazula, the Yukon government’s paleontologist.
In less than a half-hour, Dr. Zazula had a picture of the incredible find: A near-perfect mummified baby woolly mammoth, only the second one ever found in the world, and the first in North America.
“She has a trunk. She has a tail. She has tiny little ears. She has the little prehensile end of the trunk where she could use it to grab grass,” said Zazula. “She’s perfect and she’s beautiful.”
Dr. Zazula has been studying the ice age in the Yukon since 1999. “And this has been something that I’ve always dreamed of, to see one face to face. This week, that dream really came true.”
In a news release, the Yukon government and the indigenous Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation, on whose land the discovery was made, called the find a “significant discovery for Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin and the Government of Yukon.”
Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Elders named the mammoth calf Nun cho ga, meaning “big baby animal” in the Hän language. The Elders also performed a ceremony to honor the remains. “It’s amazing. It took my breath away when they removed the tarp,” says elder Peggy Kormendy.
The young female died during the Ice Age about 30,000 years ago, per USA Today, and she was only about 30 days old at the time. She appeared healthy and had eaten grass shortly before her death. One theory is that the animal became hopelessly mired in mud while walking near her mother.
Nun cho ga is roughly the same size as the 42,000-year-old infant mummy woolly mammoth “Lyuba” discovered in Siberia in 2007.
