Fully preserved 35,000-year-old woolly mammoth remains found in Canada

A Canadian gold miner came across a 35,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth, the most completely mummified mammal in the United States.

Last week, a mummified cotton mammoth was found in a Klondike golden field in the Trʼondek Hwëchʼin First Nations District, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Miners working in the field discovered frozen woolly mammoths during ongoing excavations. The Trondek Hwachin elders named the mammoth calf Nun Cho Gaa, which means “large animal” in Henry.

“She is perfect and beautiful,” Grant Zazura, a paleontologist in Canada’s Yukon Territory, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

“It has a torso. It has a tail. It has small ears. It has a small folding edge that can be used to catch grass.”

The Yukon Territory has world-famous fossil records of ice age animals, but mummified remains of skin and hair are rarely found. Nun Cho Ga is the most completely mummified mammoth found in North America.

A brief examination of the woolly mammoth revealed that it was female and about the same size as the 42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth that Liuba found in Siberia in 2007.

Geological surveys from the University of Yukon and geologists from the University of Calgary have found frozen mammoths in the ground, suggesting that the nuns died and froze during the freeze period more than 30,000 years ago.

The Nun Cho Ga discovery is the first and most complete and best preserved mummified woolly mammoth found in North America. A partial mammoth calf named Effie was found in an Alaskan gold mine in 1948.

The Ice Age ruins give researchers a detailed look at the nun moth roaming the Yukon with wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.

In the coming months, Trondek Hwachin and the Yukon government announced that they would work together to support and educate the nun Cho Ga.