Ice age baby mammoth Found in Yukon - 18th July 2022

A perfectly preserved, mummified fossil of a complete baby woolly mammoth has been unearthed from the northwest Canadian permafrost. Judged to have been frozen in time over 30,000 years ago, the mummified ice age mammoth came to light as gold miners were excavating the icy ground of the Yukon's Klondike region.

Elders of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation, which has the historical claim to the land have bestowed the name 'Nun cho ga' on the infant. The name, which translates into English as 'big baby animal', is in the indigenous Han language traditionally spoken across the region.

Among those involved in the scientific investigation is Grant Zazula. “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,” he explained.

A preliminary examination of the woolly mammoth indicated that she's female and of similar proportions to 'Lyuba', an infant woolly mammoth frozen in the Siberian permafrost 42,000 years ago, excavated in 2007.

The painstaking task of extracting the mammoth's body from the site was performed by geologists from the Yukon Geological Survey and University of Calgary. They observed that Nun cho ga's near perfect preservation is likely due to the speed at which she became frozen in the ice over 30,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period.

While a wealth of ice age fossil records have made the Yukon a world-renowned centre for palaeontology, mummified remains complete with skin and hair are hardly ever unearthed. This complete baby woolly mammoth, the best-preserved mammoth find to date in North America, is a once in a lifetime occurrence.

The chance discovery of Nun cho ga came when a miner requested his superior inspect an object which his bulldozer had struck in the mud, according to CBC news. The Tr'ondek Hwech'in, Yukon government and palaeontologists now plan to collaborate to gain a deeper understanding of the petite proboscidean beast. They'll explore how this can expand our knowledge of life in the region 30,000 years ago.