Miners in the Klondike gold mines in the far north of Canada have uncovered a rare object, excavating the submerged remains of a nearly perfect baby woolly mammoth.
Members of the local Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation named the calf Nun cho ga, meaning "big baby animal."
Paleontologist Grant Zazula described the small tyke, which kept its skin and hair "beautiful and one of the most amazingly immersed ice age animals ever found in the world."
"I'm glad to know him more," he said in a statement.
The baby mammoth fossils have been found during excavations in the snowy region south of Dawson City in the Yukon region of Canada, bordering the US state of Alaska.
The animal is believed to have been a female and would have died in the snow, more than 30,000 years ago when woolly mammoths roamed the region near wild horses, cave lions and a large steppe buffalo.
This discovery marks the first complete, well-preserved woolly woolly mammoth found in North America.
Part of the calf of a large animal, named Effie, was discovered in 1948 in a gold mine in central Alaska.
A 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth, known as Lyuba, was also discovered in Siberia in 2007. Lyuba and Nun cho ga are almost identical, according to the Yukon government.
It noted that Yukon "has a world-famous fossil record of Ice Age, but buried remains with skin and hair are rarely excavated."
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