(ORDO NEWS) — Paleontologists from the Yukon presented an unusual find, which was made in 2018 by a gold miner in the Canadian Klondike.
In the permafrost, he discovered the mummy of an American ground squirrel that lived about 30,000 years ago. According to the CBC publication, the young individual could die during hibernation.
Glaciers, ice spots and permafrost have allowed numerous antiquities to survive to this day.
One of the most striking of these finds is the mummy of an ice man, nicknamed Ötzi, a man who died in the Alps more than five thousand years ago (more about him in the material “From the abyss in the ice”).
No less famous are the well-preserved mummified remains of representatives of the Ice Age fauna: woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), cave lion (Panthera spelaea), Lena horse (Equus lenensis) and other large animals.
With small representatives of the fauna, things are somewhat worse, for example, mummified rodents are found quite rarely.
However, such examples are known. For example, the story of one such discovery begins the work “The Gulag Archipelago” – in 1946, prisoners unearthed three mummified ground squirrels in the Yakut permafrost, who lived about 30 thousand years ago.
Subsequently, several mummies of voles and lemmings also came into the possession of scientists, one of which turned out to be even more than 50 thousand years old.
Paleontologists from Canada’s Yukon region have reported another Ice Age rodent mummy. In 2018, a prospector working in the gold mines near the small town of Dawson (Klondike) discovered the remains of a small animal that turned out to be an ancient American ground squirrel (Urocitellus parryii).
X-ray showed that the perfectly preserved mummy belonged to a young individual. The curled-up animal, according to the researchers, may have been able to do it during its first hibernation.
The age of the find is about 30 thousand years. At the same time, unlike mammoths, homotheriums (Homotherium) and other representatives of the Pleistocene fauna, American ground squirrels continue to live in the Yukon today.
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