Autopsy on 42,000 Year Old Corpse - Mammoths and Mastodons

We stopped by the Anchorage museum's visiting Mammoths and Mastodons Exhibit Sunday.  It will be here until Sunday October 9 for those of you who have been putting it off.


There are lots of pictures and replica's of mammoths and mastodons - some you could hold and others life size.  .   There are lots of "Please Touch" signs. There are also lots of videos and interactive exhibits  A good one was the cave where you can use a remote control to shine light and identify some of the drawings on the walls.

But the exhibit that grabbed me most was Lyuba.  This is a life size replica of a complete one month old mammoth found in Russia.

Click to enlarge and make clearer

Great video describing Lyuba, how she died, how she was found, and how they learned from her.

[UPDATE May 22, 2012: Here are two videos from National Geographic. I think there were parts of these two, plus another in the video we saw. The first is about the discovery of Lyuba:

Here's a link to a video of the discovery of Lyuba. (I couldn't get the embed code to work.) The second is of the autopsy:

Any idea where or when the most recent mammoth tusks were found?

3,700 years ago isn't that long a time.  There were some relatively sophisticated human societies living then in China and the Middle East.


And then we went outside, got rid of most of our clothes and went Mastodon hunting behind the museum.