Scientific experts uncovered a complete carcass of a woolly mammoth in Russia after an 11-year-old boy informed about the remains lying in the northern Taymyr peninsula.
The discovery of the almost complete body of the extinct animal surprised scientists who said such intact remains were not seen in the past 100 years.
The primary analysis of the excavated remains of the woolly mammoth revealed that it was a male which lived about 30,000 years ago. The frozen body of the beast weighed 500 kg and is believed to have died when it was 15 years old.
It is reported that excavators took almost a week to dig out the body, which was found with undestroyed fur, bones, flesh and even some organs. The latest discovery of mammoth may aid scientists to clone the animal.
The wolly mammoth discovered is unofficially named 'Zhenya' after the boy who first found the body, and the scientific name given to it is Sopkarga mammoth. It will be kept for permanent display at the Taymyr Natural History Museum after palaeontologists finish tests and studies on the remains in Moscow and St Petersburg.
"We can see that this animal was very well adapted to the northern environment, accumulating massive amounts of fat. This animal likely died during the summer period as we can't see much of its undercoat, but it had already accumulated a sufficient amount of fat," Aleksey Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences told Russian News Agency Itar-Tass.
Earlier this year, another mammoth named Yuka was unearthed from Siberia. The attempt to clone the ice-age animal was earlier done, but the unavailability of enough genetic material put those efforts in vain.
In 2011, a team of scientist from Kyoto University planned to insert a mammoth DNA in to the egg cells of an African elephant. The latest unearthed woolly mammoth will probably will help the scientist in future experiments.
