Members of the Yukagir tribe in Siberia discovered a 9,300-year-old frozen bison mummy complete with all its organs and even some fur.
Details of the necropsy of the animal, which was discovered in 2011, were presented recently at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Berlin. The animal, dubbed the Yukagir bison mummy, is a steppe bison or bison priscus, which went extinct after the Ice Age. Never has a steppe bison mummy been found so complete.
The specimen had a relatively normal anatomy despite a lack of fat around its abdomen, indicating it may have starved to death, researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow discovered.
"The exceptionally good preservation of the Yukagir bison mummy allows direct anatomical comparisons with modern species of bison and cattle, as well as with extinct species of bison that were gone at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary," said Evgeny Maschenko, of the Paleontological Institute in Moscow.
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