Canada's perfectly preserved mammoth - 18th July 2022

A mammoth discovery has been made in the permafrost of north-western Canada, where a whole baby woolly mammoth has been uncovered. The mummified ice age mammoth is thought to date from over 30,000 years ago.

Gold miners stumbled on the fossil in the Yukon's Klondike region. The area belongs to the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation – and is the most impressive such discovery in North America. The infant's been named 'Nun cho ga', meaning 'big baby animal', in the region's indigenous Han language.

Grant Zazula's delighted by the find. “As an ice age palaeontologist, it has been one of my lifelong dreams to come face to face with a real woolly mammoth. Nun cho ga is beautiful, and one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world.”

An early examination of the woolly mammoth established that she's female and roughly of equal size to the Siberian fossil 'Lyuba'. This 42,000-year-old infant woolly mammoth was unearthed from the Siberian permafrost in 2007.

Geologists from the Yukon Geological Survey and University of Calgary recovered the frozen mammoth from the site. Conditions suggest that Nun cho ga was quickly frozen following her death over 30,000 years ago, during the last ice age.

Despite the Yukon's reputation for ice age animal fossil records, it's still exceptionally rare for mummified remains with skin and hair to be found. This find makes history as the best-preserved woolly mammoth discovery ever recorded in North America.

According to CBC news, a miner had called his boss over to examine something in the mud that he'd hit with his bulldozer. This turned out to be Nun cho ga. The Tr'ondek Hwech'in and Yukon government will now work with palaeontologists to learn more about the diminutive mammoth and what insights she can offer into the region 30,000 years ago.