A woolly mammoth calf discovered in 2024 underwent its first detailed postmortem analysis by researchers from Russia’s Institute of Experimental Medicine in Saint Petersburg. After spending around 130,000 years buried in Siberian permafrost, Yana (named after the river basin in which she was found) is one of the most well-preserved mammoth specimens ever found. The opportunity to conduct a necropsy on Yana will likely yield a trove of new information about the species and its Late Pleistocene environment. That said, spending hours up-close-and-personal with a nearly 400-pound thawing carcass may not have been the most enjoyable experience.
According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Yana’s examiners described the roughly four-foot-tall calf as smelling like a “mixture of fermented earth and flesh” after spending tens of thousands of years “macerated in the Siberian subsoil.”
The findings are already proving to be worth any unpleasantness. Over multiple hours, experts wearing sterile bodysuits, facemasks, and goggles made incisions into Yana’s front quarters using scalpels, surgical scissors, and other medical tools. The permafrost’s freezerlike conditions allowed the mammoth to retain much of its gray-brown skin, and even patches of reddish hair.
In addition to removing exterior samples, the team of biologists and zoologists collected portions of Yana’s digestive tract, including her stomach and colon. Researchers are particularly interested in the contents of the colon, which could include ancient microorganisms that improve our understanding of the evolutionary trajectory to their modern descendants. Further examinations may also reveal the microbiotic environment inside Yana while she was alive.
The young mammoth’s mouth also helped better pinpoint her age at the time of death. The discovery of milk tusks—akin to human baby teeth—proved Yana was at least a year old when she died, but not old enough for them to have already fallen out. And while her cause of death remains a mystery, one culprit can be crossed off the list of suspects: humans.
“Here on the territory of Yakutia there were not yet any humans,” Mammoth Museum director Maxim Cheprasov explained to the AFP, adding that they didn’t arrive in the area until 28,000–32,000 years ago.
Although humans weren’t responsible for Yana’s death, they are almost certainly behind the circumstances that led to her discovery. After remaining frozen for 130,000 years, warming global temperatures are causing permafrosts to thaw and reveal their long-hidden contents.
While specimens like Yana offer valuable new insights, there are potential dangers to these opportunities. Some experts have expressed worries that melting permafrost may release hibernating pathogenic microorganisms into a world that isn’t equipped to handle or resist them.
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