A well-preserved Ice Age woolly rhinoceros with many of its internal organs still intact has been recovered from the permafrost of Russia’s far north. Russian media reported on Wednesday that the carcass was revealed by the melting permafrost in Yakutia in August.
Scientists are waiting for the Arctic ice roads to become passable to take it to a lab for studies next month.
Valery Plotnikov / AP
It is one of the best preserved copies of the Ice Age animal found so far. The carcass still has most of its soft tissues intact, including part of the intestines, thick hair and a lump of fat. The horn was found next to it.
Great discoveries of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, Ice Age foals and cave lion cubs have been made in recent years as permafrost continues to melt in vast areas of Siberia due to global warming.
Yakutia 24 TV quoted Valery Plotnikov, a paleontologist at the regional branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as saying the woolly rhinoceros was probably three or four years old when it died.
Plotnikov said the young rhinoceros probably drowned.
Scientists dated the carcass as being somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 years old. More accurate dating will be possible once it is delivered to a radiocarbon testing lab.
The carcass was found on the bank of the Tirekhtyakh River in the Abyisk district, close to the area where another young woolly rhinoceros was recovered in 2014. Researchers dated that specimen, which they named Sasha, at 34,000 years old.