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This cave lion cub died 28,000 years ago. Nicknamed Sparta, the animal has been preserved in permafrost and, according to scientists, “is probably the best-preserved ice age animal ever found, and is more or less intact, aside from the somewhat ruffled fur.” .
“She even had the mustaches preserved,” says Love Dalen, a professor at the Center for Paleogenetics, who co-led a new study on the cub that was found several years ago in the Semyuelyakh River in Russia by a group at looking for mammoth tusks for sale.
Another bear cub was found nearby, apparently dead 43,000 years ago, but it was not as well preserved as Sparta.
From CNN:
“Considering their conservation, they must have been buried very quickly. So maybe they died in a mudslide or fell into a permafrost crack,” Dalen said. “Permafrost forms large cracks due to seasonal thaw and frost[…]
The mummified remains of a number of extinct animals – a woolly rhino, a lark, a cave bear, a canine puppy – that once roamed the Russian steppe have been found in recent years, often by hunters, who dig tunnels using high pressure water. pipes in permafrost mainly looking for long curved mammoth tusks. There is a lucrative – albeit controversial – trade in tusks, which are prized by ivory sculptors and collectors as an alternative to elephant ivory.[…]
The climate crisis has also played a role. Warmer summers – the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average – have weakened the permafrost layer and lengthened the tusk hunting season.
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