He was pretty taken aback – I don’t think I’d prepared him for how well preserved the mammoth was. I loaded the remains into an excavator bucket and drove them up to the mine’s main camp, where Brian and I examined them further. All in all, the body was about 4ft 6in long. I had uncovered only the front half of the body, and wondered if there was more, so used the ripper attachment to cautiously poke around in the same area, eventually uncovering the mammoth’s back legs and rump, complete with a cool little tail. “Brian, I think it’s a baby mammoth.”īrian told me to dig out the body and bring it straight up to camp. Wiping away some of the black muck coating the head, I saw it was more than a skull – it still had skin and ears, as well as what appeared to be a trunk. At that stage, we assumed we were dealing with a few bones, but when I looked closer I realised I was looking at something much more unusual. “I think it’s a buffalo or something,” I said. My boss, Brian, was on site, so I called him on the two-way radio. Miners often uncover the skeletons of animals such as ancient bison in this part of the Yukon – like other members of the crew, I’d been trained to remove these finds with care. As I chipped at the bottom of a frozen bank of earth, I pulled a chunk away and saw something that I first took to be a skull. The cut I was working in was surrounded by pine forests and had been dug down to about 60ft below the treeline.
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