In May 2007, a one-month-old woolly mammoth (Mammathus primigenius) gave scientists an incredible glimpse into the past when her perfectly intact remains were discovered near the shores of Yuribei River on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Frozen for 40,000 years in permafrost, the baby mammoth named Lyuba by researchers is the most well-preserved mammoth—right down to her eyelashes and tufts of her dark brown hair—ever found.
Lyuba is not the first woolly mammoth found in Siberia. In fact, she is only one out of the dozen mammoth remains uncovered since researchers’ first mammoth discovery in 1806. Dr. Dan Fisher, a paleontologist from University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, was one of the scientists who studied Lyuba.
“When I saw her, my first thought was ‘Oh my goodness, she’s perfect.’ It looked like she’d just drifted off to sleep. Suddenly, what I’d been struggling to visualize for so long was lying right there for me to touch,” explains Fisher.
Scientists went to work right away using CT scans to generate the most comprehensive three-dimensional images of Lyuba’s entire 220-pound, three-foot-tall body, allowing a closer look at her internal organs.
Dr. Fisher remarked, “Though she is not large, no other specimen preserves this much of the original anatomy. That makes her a remarkable scientific resource.” The CT scans indicated that Lyuba had healthy amounts of fat tissue and no skeletal damage. Since her organs were frozen in pristine condition, scientists were able to photograph and collect tissue samples from her body.
Milk residue in Lyuba’s intestinal tissue provided scientists with the first ever sample of mammoth milk and suggested that she had fed on her mother’s milk and feces just before death. The latter proved very interesting to scientists, as it is common behavior among modern baby elephants to consume feces. Unable to digest their food at such a young age, baby elephants eat fecal matter to assemble colonies of bacteria that will aid them in digestion of plant material. Until now, this behavior was never documented among mammoths, but suggests that they share common behavioral traits with modern elephants.
Trapped inside Lyuba’s trunk, trachea, and mouth was mud, revealing a plausible cause of death: asphyxiation. It is likely that while crossing a muddy stream, Lyuba’s young, uncoordinated body may have become stuck in the thick medium, thus forcing her to flail in fear and choke on mud, either suffocating or drowning.
Scientists also obtained samples of her tusks and premolars. The composition of her teeth provides scientists with a record of her life story, telling them everything from the climate she lived in to her behavior, diet, and the season in which she died.
“This is the first time we have been able to do a detailed comparison of a mammoth’s tusk and tooth data with soft tissues from the rest of its body,” said Dr. Fisher.
Scientists concluded that Lyuba died in spring.
After a DNA analysis of her tissue, 70 per cent of the mammoth genome was successfully decoded and comprised 4.7 billion base pairs—the largest known mammal genome and the first to be reconstructed from an extinct animal. Because the woolly mammoth shares 99.4 per cent of its DNA with the Asian elephant, some scientists hypothesize that they may be able resurrect the woolly mammoth via in vitro fertilization or cloning. In vitro fertilization would entail isolating a sperm cell from a frozen mammoth, fertilizing an elephant egg with the mammoth sperm, and implanting the fertilized egg in a female elephant, culminating in the birth of a mammoth-elephant hybrid.
Over many generations, backcross hybrids of elephant-mammoths may be genetically engineered to create a purer mammoth species. The cloning process would involve removing the nucleus from the egg of an elephant and replacing it with the nucleus of a frozen mammoth cell. The cell would then be chemically or electrically stimulated to divide and then implanted in the uterus of an elephant. If the process was a success, the elephant would give birth to a mammoth.
“I laughed when Steven Spielburg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable,” says Hendrik Poinar, director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University, on Spielburg’s film Jurassic Park. “But I’m not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It’s just a matter of working out the details.”
