Image of the Week 6

In 2007, a reindeer herder and his two sons found this remarkably well-preserved baby woolly mammoth frozen solid in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (District) in northern Russia. The herder named her (for it is indeed a she) Lyuba, after his wife. The International Mammoth Committee, a consortium of scientists dedicated to the preservation and study of mammoth remains, has safeguarded and studied Lyuba ever since. Usually quartered at the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum and Exhibition Centre in Salekhard, Russia, she is beginning a tour across the United States. Her first stop is Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

Scientists report that Lyuba lived a tragically short life. Yet, the unique circumstances of her death have permitted us to learn a great deal about her mammoth kin, who roamed the planet as recently as ten millennia ago. Some 42,000 years ago, when Lyuba was just one month old and still nursing on her mother’s milk, fell into a muddy river bank. Struggling in vain to free herself, she sank and suffocated in the muck. Her remains froze in the permafrost, slowing decay and preserving soft tissue, skin, hair, and even stomach contents.

In short, Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah) is a rare and Earth-shattering find. As far as mammoth remains go, we’re used to finding skeletons, occasionally clumps of hair or tissue, or one or two mummified remains. A whole frozen animal can (and in this case, has) revealed a lot. CAT and MRI scans of her soft tissues have shown us how her innards are arranged. Stomach contents revealed that she’d still been nursing when she died. Hair and skin samples have even given molecular biologists like me something to drool over: a rare specimen of intact mammoth DNA!

Lyuba’s tour of the United States will hopefully draw attention to the problems faced by the International Mammoth Committee. Most woolly mammoth specimens (skeletal or otherwise) that have been recovered frozen and relatively well-preserved in permafrost. However, as Siberian permafrost melts for good, no one knows how many undiscovered mammoth specimens there are that will begin to thaw and decay. The International Mammoth Committee is racing against time to unearth mammoth remains and preserve them for study. Otherwise, we’ll only have a handful of samples like Lyuba to help us understand these elephant relatives that roamed the northern latitudes with our ancestors.

If you find yourself in Chicago up through 6 September 2010, head on over to the Field Museum and see Lyuba for yourself. The exhibit will also go to Boston, Jersey City, Saint Louis, Denver, San Diego, and Anchorage.

Image of Lyuba, a one-month old female woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) preserved by Siberian permafrost, is provided courtesy of the International Mammoth Committee and Francis Latreille.