Joanna Carver

4 October 2012

(Images: Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences/Photas/ITAR-TASS/Press Association Images)

An 11-year-old Russian boy stumbled across the 30,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, an experience that was surely either incredibly exciting or permanently traumatising.

According to the Moscow News, Yevgeny Salinder found the 500-kilogram beast in the tundra of the Taymyr peninsula in northern Russia. Scientists laboured for a week with axes and steam to dig it out of the permafrost it's been encased in for centuries.

Woolly mammoths have been found in the permafrost in Siberia since at least 1929, but this is one of the best preserved. Its tusks, mouth and rib cage are clearly visible.

The mammoth is being called Zhenya, sharing a nickname with the boy who discovered it, but is officially the Sopkarga mammoth. There are plans for it to be studied by palaeontologists in Moscow and St Petersburg before going on display permanently at the Taymyr Natural History Museum.

It seems inevitable with such a discovery that the possibility of cloning a mammoth will be revived. A team of Japanese scientists are apparently working with DNA from a carcass in a Russian laboratory to produce a clone. A big obstacle, of course, is degraded, ice-damaged DNA.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/10/boy-dis...