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.
China’s largest naval training ship sailed for the Philippines yesterday, its last stop of a regional “friendly” tour, amid growing unease over Chinese maritime activities in the South China Sea. The giant training vessel, Qi Jiguang, bigger than a typical destroyer, left Brunei on Thursday for the Philippines as part of a 40-day trip, which has included stops in Vietnam and Thailand. At the end of its trip, Qi Jiguang and its crew of 476 navy students and officers would have passed through the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea, Gulf of Thailand and Western Pacific. ‘FRIENDLY’ Training conducted by the ship,
A long trek across the desert of northeastern Niger brings visitors to one of the most astonishing and rewarding sights in the Sahel: fortified villages of salt and clay perched on rocks with the Saharan sands laying siege below. Generations of travelers have stood before the “ksars” of Djado, wondering at their crenelated walls, watchtowers, secretive passages and wells, all of them testifying to a skilled, but unknown hand. Who chose to build this outpost in a scorched and desolate region — and why they built it — are questions that have never been fully answered. Just as beguiling is why it
‘NATURAL CAUSES’: New evidence indicated Kathleen Folbigg’s two daughters died of myocarditis caused by genetics, while a son died of a neurogenetic disorder An Australian woman who spent 20 years in prison was pardoned and released yesterday based on new scientific evidence that her four children died by natural causes as she had insisted. The pardon was seen as the quickest way of getting Kathleen Folbigg out of prison and a final report from the second inquiry into her guilt could recommend that the state Court of Appeals quash her convictions. Folbigg, now 55, was released from a prison in Grafton, New South Wales, following an unconditional pardon by state Governor Margaret Beazley. Australian state governors are figureheads who act on instructions of governments. New South
RE-ENGAGEMENT: Both sides described the talks as ‘candid’ and ‘productive,’ with the US State Department saying that it wants to restore ‘high-level diplomacy’ Senior US and Chinese officials yesterday held “candid” talks in Beijing, days after the two countries’ defense chiefs squared off at a security forum. US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink met with Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu (馬朝旭), becoming the most senior US official to publicly travel to Beijing since an alleged Chinese spy balloon was downed in the US. Both sides described the talks as “candid” and “productive” in their readouts, with the US Department of State saying that the exchange was part of ongoing efforts to restore “high-level diplomacy.” The Chinese
RSS