The world's 'best-preserved' baby woolly mammoth is found after 50,000 years in the 'Mouth of Hell'
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The world's 'best preserved' baby woolly mammoth has been found in a Siberian crater known as the Mouth of Hell. The mammoth, who has been named Yana, lived more than 50,000 years old and evidently suffered a fatal injury to her back during the Ice Age. She was around one-year-old when she was killed.
![[Researchers Gavril Novgorodov and Erel Struchkov pose for a picture next to the carcass of a baby mammoth, which is estimated to be over 50,000 years and was found in the Siberian permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, Russia on June 13, 2024]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/14/93427169-14221633-image-m-11_1734964784144.jpg)
Yana was preserved in the permafrost in the Batagai megaslump, a rapidly expanding thermokarst depression in the Yakutia region of Russia, which is visible from space and also known as Gateway to the Underworld. Of seven baby woolly mammoths found in the world - six of them in Russia - Yana is the most intact, with her trunk clearly visible and 'uniquely preserved'.
![[Yana, pictured, lived more than 50,000 years old and evidently suffered a fatal injury to her back during the Ice Age. She was around one-year-old when she was killed]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/14/93427153-14221633-image-m-12_1734964809590.jpg)
The 'incredible' remains were found this summer but only now announced by Russian scientists. The mammoth was 4ft tall at the withers, with a weight of around 180kg - or 28 stone, or almost 400lbs. The extinct animal's limbs had been pecked at by ancient sparrows or small mammals, but all the organs remain intact.
![[The 'incredible' remains were found this summer but only now announced by Russian scientists. The mammoth was 4ft tall at the withers, with a weight of around 180kg - or 28 stone, or almost 400lbs]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/14/93427179-14221633-image-a-13_1734964827758.jpg)
Yana, the world's 'best preserved' baby woolly mammoth, (pictured) has been found in a Siberian crater known as the Mouth of Hell. Researchers Gavril Novgorodov and Erel Struchkov pose for a picture next to the carcass of a baby mammoth, which is estimated to be over 50,000 years and was found in the Siberian permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, Russia on June 13, 2024.
![[Maxim Cheprasov, head of the Mammoth Museum laboratory, North Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, said that Yana's 'trunk, lips, ears, eye sockets are preserved - they were not eaten by predators']](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/23/14/93427157-14221633-image-a-14_1734964833967.jpg)
