Posted on 07/10/2007 1:48:34 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Frozen baby mammoth to be sent to Japan for research
(Kyodo) _ A frozen mammoth found recently in Russia in unprecedented good condition is set to be sent to a Japanese university for examination, several experts told Kyodo News on Friday.
The mammoth, thought to be a six-month-old female, was found in the best state of preservation among all frozen mammoths ever recovered, said the experts.
"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery."
The mammoth is expected to be sent to Naoki Suzuki, a professor at Tokyo's Jikei University, for CT scanning in December or later, according to the experts.
The experts, who met Thursday in Salekhard, near the site of the discovery, also decided to send some tissue taken from the mammoth to the Netherlands to help determine when it died.
The mammoth was uncovered in the northern part of western Siberia in May after a reindeer herder found part of its ivory near the Yuribey River. ADVERTISEMENT
Estimated to weigh 50 kilograms and be 120 centimeters in height, it has been named "Lyuba" after the herder's wife.
According to Tikhonov, some Japanese research institutes are equipped with large-scale CT scanners and have examined two mammoths sent from Russia in the past.
Suzuki, speaking from Tokyo, said images taken by the CT scanners would be used to recreate by computer the inside of the well-preserved mammoth, "providing an unprecedented opportunity to obtain anatomically important data."
Mammoths, which first appeared as long as 4.8 million years ago, have been extinct for thousands of years.
Get it cloned, I want to see a real one grazing....
Me too.
Hey, that’s just a scientific reconstruction of the original face on the Sphinx.
Thanks! Normally I’m the one who finds all the old related topics.
Of course, I’d have put ‘em in chrono, alpha, or relevance order, but I’m a geek...
More mammoth stuff from Wikipedia:
“The southern mammoth consequently declined, being replaced across most of its territory by the cold-adapted steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii). This in turn gave rise to the woolly mammoth, (Mammuthus primigenius) around 300,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths were better able to cope with the extreme cold of the Ice Ages.
The woollies were a spectacularly successful species; they ranged from Spain to North America and are thought to have existed in huge numbers...
...Fossils of species of dwarf mammoth have been found on the Californian Channel Islands (Mammuthus exilis) and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (Mammuthus lamarmorae). There was also a race of dwarf woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, within the Arctic Circle.”
Well, that pic sure explains why someone chiseled the face off that monument...
Looks like a regular elephant to me.
A picture of what Democrats think is the state of the current Republican party?
Makeup’ll do wonders!
Mammoth told her there’d be days like that.
Sorry, I just *have* to use that joke somewhere in every mammoth topic.
I like geeks. I married one :)
Why not? Many willingly shop at a place called "Dress Barn"!
Great info! Thank you.
And wear blouses made by "Sag Harbor".
Thanks. I sorta figured that one out myself. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has ever seen anything similar in the published literature?
Ha! At least that's a real geographical place out in the Hamptons on Long Island!
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