A male mammoth from the 30th millennium B.C. in near-mint condition was found in Siberia by an 11-year-old local boy out for a stroll with his dog, local media reported.
The part of the carcass preserved in ice weighed about 500 kilograms, Taimyr24.ru said. It came complete with part of the hide, plenty of flesh, an ear, a tusk, a handful of bones, and penis and testicles.
This is the second best-preserved mammoth in history in paleontology and the first find of such quality since 1901, Alexei Tikhonov of the Mammoth Committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences said, Taimyr24.ru reported.
The mammoth was 15 or 16 years old at the time of death, which makes it pretty young, given mammoths’ average life expectancy of 60 to 80 years.
The creature was nicknamed Zhenya, after Yevgeny, or Zhenya, Salinder, the boy who found it when strolling near a meteorological station on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, Taimyr24.ru said.
The mammoth, which is being shipped off to Krasnoyarsk Region and then to researchers in Moscow, is a unique find, said Yevgeny Mashchenko of the Paleontological Institute in Moscow, Kommersant reported on Thursday.
But the ancient proboscidean has gone “a bit spoiled” and cannot be cloned, Boris Kuznetsov of the Bioengineering Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences told the daily.