Secret of 37,000-year-old mammoths

The body of a 37,000-year-old baby mammoth found in the permafrost of the Arctic is slowly opening up new mysteries about extinct animals at the end of the ice age about 10,000 years ago. year.

Lyuba is the most perfect mammoth corpse ever found.

The baby mammoth is perfectly preserved as if it had just slept rather than slept during the last 37,000 years due to being trapped in the permafrost of the Arctic. Brown hairs still stick to the elephant about 1 meter tall. Even eyelashes are still intact.
The elephant, named Lyuba, is the most complete mammoth corpse ever found.

Lyuba was discovered on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia in May 2007. This 1-month-old flesh-and-blood elephant is helping scientists decipher the lives of animals that lived at the end of the ice age.

What remains in Lyuba's stomach is valuable evidence that helps scientists understand more about the foods that mammoths and their children once ate. The fat and minerals in Lyuba's teeth help provide information about its health and herd.

Paleontologists now believe that the information they gathered from Lyuba's corpses could help them understand what caused the extinct mammoths about 10,000 years ago.

Scientists use microsurgery techniques to study elephant bodies.

It is believed that mammoths are extinct because they cannot adapt to the changing world when global temperatures rise at the end of the ice age. However, some scientists believe that mammoth extinction is caused by human hunting.

Through the study of mammoth corpses, scientists found that Lyuba was in good health and had enough to eat and drink before dying. That showed that Lyuba's pack had found many food at that time.

'Mammoths are the largest and most common animal among extinct animals at the end of the ice age. This is the first time we have been able to make detailed comparisons of information regarding mammoth teeth with soft tissues from the rest of the body, ' Dan Fisher, paleontologist at University of Michigan (USA), said.

Dozens of mammoth corpses have been found in Siberia since the first mammoth corpses in 1806. However, none of these elephants are perfectly preserved like Lyuba.

'Although Lyuba is not a mature mammoth, no such well-preserved corpse is found, so Lyuba is a valuable scientific repository,' Dan Fisher said.

In the past 2 years, paleontologists from the US, Russia, and Japan have carefully done tests for Lyuba.

Using the latest medical scanning technology, scientists have 'deciphered' the body of the elephant and found a clue about its death.

Scientists have found sediment inside the elephant's mouth, mouth and windpipe. They believe that the elephant may have been suffocated after being bogged down in a mud puddle, where its body was preserved.
Scientists also discovered that the baby elephant was breastfed before dying. They also found fecal material in Lyuba's stomach and this could help explain the origin of a modern elephant habit.

Young elephants often eat adult elephant dung to provide the necessary bacteria in the stomach to help digest the grass they will eat later.

The discovery of a perfectly preserved mammoth also opens up hopes that scientists could one day use frozen elephant DNA to clone a mammoth.