About half an hour before his lunch break one June morning, Travis Mudry operates a backhoe and digs through permafrost in the Klondike goldfields of Canada’s Yukon.
He scratched a frozen wall of earth. Suddenly a big chunk came out. Along with it was a body of a baby woolly mammoth, frozen and preserved with hair and skin.
“I thought it was a baby buffalo at first,” said 31-year-old Mr. Mudry from Alberta. “And then I got out, and I inspected it, and it had a suitcase, so I had no words.”
The mammoth was dark and shiny, Mr Mudry said, with short legs and deep, pronounced eye sockets. It had a lean, wrinkled trunk and a tail tip. He waved quickly to a colleague and called his boss, Brian McCaughan, the co-founder of a family-owned gold mining company called Treadstone Equipment.
“It’s glistening in the sun in front of us and it looks like it just died,” McCaughan, 57, said of the discovery, made on June 21. “It was crazy.”
He compared its size to that of a white-tailed deer. Mr. McCaughan said that unearthing bones, even mammoths, was common during mining operations, but this discovery was something beyond compare. “It’s like we’ve been rewarded by Mother Earth for pulling something like this out of the ground,” he said.
Experts estimate that the mammoth was just over a month old when it died in the mud. It was then caught in time, encased in the frozen ground layer known as permafrost, during the Ice Age more than 30,000 years ago, said Grant Zazula, a paleontologist for the government of Yukon.
To be preserved so well, the mammoth must have been buried in the mud very quickly, said Mr. Zazula, calling the conditions “a miracle.”
He said the baby mammoth was about 140 centimeters from the base of its tail to the base of its trunk, which is just over four and a half feet.
Although the body had broken in half, possibly by the backhoe or by natural forces over time, he said it was “complete from tip to tail.”
He said it may be the best-preserved specimen found in North America and could even surpass Lyuba, a female woolly mammoth calf found in Siberia in 2017, nearly intact but without a tail.
Woolly mammoths, ancestors of modern elephants, once roamed the Northern Hemisphere. They disappeared about 10,000 years ago due to excessive hunting and climate change.
Mammoths were plentiful in the Yukon’s ancient past, said Joshua H. Miller, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Cincinnati.
Today, the area has a “wonderful” fossil record of prehistoric animals, including steppe bison, ancient cats and short-faced bears, said Mr. Miller, adding that mining had contributed to the wealth of discoveries. But most of them have been bones, not mummies.
The find is important for research, said Mr. Miller. Experts can gain a better understanding of the mammoth’s anatomy and environment, and even the circumstances that led to its long preservation.
There is also deep significance to the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin people, the Yukon First Nation in whose territory the mammoth died, Mr. Zazula said. He believes this is an opportunity for healing for the nation, which has been in conflict with gold miners for a century.
The elders of Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin named the mammoth Nun cho ga, “big baby animal” in the Hän language, according to a press release released last week.
Roberta Joseph, the chief of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, said in a statement that the First Nation looked forward to working with the Yukon government “on the next steps in the process of moving forward with these remnants in a way that honors our traditions, culture and laws.”
For now, Nun cho ga lies in a freezer in the Yukon, hours from the mine where it was found, pending further analysis. While studying the mammoth will reveal “incredible details” about its ancient past, even what its last meal was, there was no rush, Mr Zazula said.
Together, the First Nation, the Yukon government, scientists and the miners embark on a journey of cultural and scientific discovery, he said.
“This woolly mammoth is really a symbol of all that together, and how we can move forward in a good way,” he said.