Meet 40,000-year-old baby mammoth Lyuba at the Royal BC Museum

A 40,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth, the best-preserved specimen in existence, will take centre stage when the Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age feature exhibition opens June 3 at the Royal B.C. Museum.

Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah) is the world’s most complete mammoth. Her remarkable discovery in the frozen soil of the Arctic in 2007 by a Siberian reindeer herder made immediate international headlines.

This will be the first opportunity to the see the baby mammoth in Canada.

Lyuba, named after the wife of the reindeer herder who found her in Siberia, is on loan from the Shemanovsky Museum in the Arctic Circle. Yuri Khudi discovered the baby mammoth with his son while they were searching for wood on the banks of the frozen Yuribei River.

She is the size of a large dog (85cm tall and 130cm long) and was probably only one month old when she died. Her body is so well preserved because she was buried in wet clay and mud and then froze. Remnants of her mother’s milk is still in her stomach.

An autopsy revealed Lyuba had clay in her trunk, leading scientists to believe she suffocated while getting water.

Agencies/Canadajournal