39000-Year-Old Baby Mammoth Goes to Moscow

She may have perished some 39,000 years ago, but Yuka the baby woolly mammoth is still teaching us about this behemoth species, and our own ancestors, as the subject of a new public display in Moscow.

Remains of the young female were discovered in 2010 in the northern reaches of Yakutia, Russia, her namesake, located on the Barents Sea. After already having been on display in Japan, Taiwan and Russian city of Vladivostok, experts thought it was time Yuka went to Moscow.

According to Albert Protopopov, a mammoth expert from the Yakutia Academy of Sciences, evidence indicates that she died at the hands of human hunters. If this is true, it suggests that Homo sapiens were occupying the region far earlier than most archaeologists believed, and that we were willing to take on these woolly beasts.

"The known sites of the ancient people in Yakutia are 32,000 years old, and this mammoth is 38,000 years old," Protopopov told The Telegraph.

Woolly mammoths went extinct around 10,000 years ago, when a warming world, changing food supply and hunting from humans killed them off, National Geographic says. Though some scientists think small groups of them lived longer in Alaska and on islands off Siberia.

These giant herbivores stood on average 10 feet tall at the shoulder and weighed as much as six tons, roughly the size of an African elephant. Mammuthus primigenius was only one of several species of mammoths, although it is the most recognized.

Still, much more is to be learned about woolly mammoths, and Yuka could provide scientists with some of the missing data.

"Paleontologists consider it to be a young woolly mammoth female aged 6-11 at the moment of death, [which] lived about 39 thousand years ago. Some scientists say that Yuka's remains are among the best preserved of all. Large parts of soft tissue, its wool and even part of the brain remained almost untouched," the Russian Geographical Society reported.