The body of a 37,000 year old baby mammoth found frozen in the artic tundra is starting to reveal new insights about the now extinct ice age beasts.
Perfectly preserved, the baby mammoth looks like she has been asleep only for a moment – not for the 37,000 years she has spent locked in the rock hard permafrost of the Arctic tundra.
Clumps of brown hair still cling to the three foot tall body, hinting at the coarse coat that would have once covered the infant. Even her eylasahes are intact.
These extraordinary images show why scientists are so excited by the discovery of Lyuba – the most complete body of a woolly mammoth ever found
Discovered at the side of a river by reindeer herders on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia, the bone month old female is helping scientists to unravel how the extinct ice age giants once lived.
The contents of her stomach have provided scientists with valuable clues about what she and her fellow mammoths ate.
The baby's layers of fat and minerals in her teeth have provided an unprecedented insight into her health and the health of her herd.
Palaeontologists now believe the information they have gleaned from the remains can help them understand what led to the woolly mammoths' ultimate extinction around 10,000 years ago.
It is thought that mammoths died out as they were unable to adapt to the changing world around them as temperatures soared at the end of the last ice age, although some experts believe they may have been hunted to extinction by humans.
The findings have shown that the baby mammoth was in good health and well fed before its death, suggesting that its herd was able to find plenty of food at the time it was alive.
"Mammoths were the largest and most widespread of the many animals that went extinct near the end of the last ice age," said Dr Dan Fisher, a palaeontologist at the University of Michigan's Museum of Palaeontology who helped to study the baby mammoth.
"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.
"Though she is not large, no other specimen preserves this much of the original anatomy. That makes her a remarkable scientific resource."
After spending 30 years studying mammoths, being able to see and touch one that so closely resembled how it would have looked when it was alive was an overwhelming experience for Dr Fisher.
He said: "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 visualise for so long was lying right there for me to touch."
The frozen remains of the baby mammoth were discovered on a sandbar beside the Yuribey River in May 2007 by a Nenets reindeer herder Yuri Khudi and three of his sons as they tended their herd.
When they told the director of a local museum about their discovery it caused a worldwide sensation and officials named the calf Lyuba after Khudi's wife.
Over the past two years palaeontologists from the US, Russia and Japan have been painstakingly examining the baby mammoth's body. Their work will be revealed tonight in a National Geographic Channel documentary.
While around a dozen other frozen woolly mammoth carcases have been found in Siberia since the first in 1806, none of them have been as complete or as well preserved as this one.
Using the latest medical scanning technology, scientists at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan, were able to produce the first ever three dimensional scan of a woolly mammoth.
It provided new insights into mammoth's anatomy and also gave clues about the baby's death. Sediment was found packed inside the baby mammoth's trunk, blocking the nasal passages, and also in the mouth and windpipe.
The experts believe that it may have suffocated to death after becoming trapped in the thick mud that eventually encased the body, where it had gradually pickled and was preserved.
They found the baby mammoth had recently fed, drinking its mothers milk. They also discovered dung inside the baby's stomach, suggesting an origin of behaviour that is seen in modern elephants today.
Baby elephants eat the dung from adults in their herd to provide them with bacteria they will need in their stomachs to digest the grass they will eat in later life.
Comparisons with other mammoth specimens have also revealed how the mammoth calves changed as they matured.
The soles of the baby's feet would have cracked as she aged to provide traction in the snow while fleshy pads behind her toes would have cushioned her steps, essential as fully grown mammoths weighed more than six tons.
Analysis on the milk tusks – the mammoth equivalent milk teeth which provide an almost daily record of the animal's life history, like rings of a tree – will also help scientists find out what the climate was like at the time and if the mammoths underwent long migrations.
Palaeontologists also hope that by comparing the baby mammoth's DNA with genetic information taken from other mammoth remains, it may be possible to understand what led to the mammoths' ultimate extinction around 10,000 years ago.
The discovery of such a well preserved carcase has also raised hopes that scientists may one day be able to use DNA from the remains to clone a woolly mammoth by inserting genetic information from the frozen body into the egg of a modern elephant.
Alexei Tikhonov, from the Russian Academy of Science who also helped to study the baby mammoth, added: "Lyuba is a creature straight out of a fairy tale. When you look at her, it's hard to understand how she could have stayed in such good condition for nearly 40,000 years."
Baby Mammoth: Frozen in Time will broadcast Sunday May 3rd at 8pm on the National Geographic Channel
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