Joel Kontinen
Siberia seems to be a treasure drove for ancient animals. Scientists have found wolves, a burly unicorn and a horse with blood flowing from it and cave lions that were not able to be fossilised despite being 10,000 years old.
The last two links are in Finnish.
Now, Fragments of the skeleton were found by local reindeer herders in the shallows of Pechevalavato Lake on the Yamalo-Nenets region a few days ago. They found part of the animal's skull, the lower jaw, several ribs, and a foot fragment with sinews still intact.
Woolly mammoths are thought to have died out around 10,000 years ago, although scientists think small groups of them may have lived on longer in Alaska and on Russia’s Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast.
Russian television stations on Friday showed scientists looking for fragments of the skeleton in the lakeside silt.
Scientists have retrieved more bones and also located more massive fragments protruding from the silt. They said it would take significant time and special equipment to recover the rest of the skeleton — if it had all survived in position.
Yevgeniya Khozyainova of the Shemanovsky Institute in Salekhard said in televised remarks that finding the complete skeleton of a mammoth is relatively rare. Such finds allow scientists to deepen their understanding of mammoths.
The ABC copy of the story includes a short video of another remarkable find: Sharks in Kentucky Mammoth Cave. The shark remains, found in the walls of the sediments that must have been an ocean in the past. They date from 330 million years ago.
Source:
Well-preserved mammoth skeleton found in Siberian lake.
ABS News . 24 July.
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