Its tail is lopsided. Close up, it looks suspiciously like a small, and unremarkable, Asian elephant.
But scientists were on Tuesday hailing the sensational discovery of a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth, which died around 10,000 years ago, and was found in the frozen tundra of northern Russia.
Experts said the six-month-old female calf was a rare complete specimen. The animal's trunk and eyes are intact. It even has fur.
A reindeer herder, Yuri Khudi, stumbled across the carcass in May near the Yuribei river in Russia's Yamal-Nenents autonomous district, in a virtually inaccessible part of north-western Siberia.
Extinct woolly mammoths -- and giant tusks -- have turned up in Siberia for centuries. But it is unusual for a complete example to be recovered.
The last major find was in 1997 when a family in the neighboring Taymyr Peninsula came across a tusk attached to what turned out to be a 20,380-year-old mammoth carcass.
The latest 130cm tall, 50kg Siberian specimen appears to have died just as the species was heading for extinction during the last ice age.
It is being sent to Japan for further tests.
"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was a bit off," Alexei Tikhonov, one of group of international experts who examined the mammoth last week in the Arctic town of Salekhard.
"In terms of its state of pre-servation, this is the world's most valuable discovery," he said.
Global warming has made it easier for woolly mammoth hunters to hack the animal out of Russia's thawing permafrost An entire mammoth industry has sprung up around the far eastern frontier town of Yakutsk.
Many examples are simply sold on the black market -- and can be seen in Russian souvenir shops, next to unhappy-looking stuffed brown bears.
Mammoths first appeared around 4.8 million years ago. Most of them died out 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene era.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS