Field Museum Gets Mammoth Honor

Lyuba is no bigger than a large dog

Lyuba, the best-preserved woolly mammoth ever found, will be making her U.S. debut at the Field Museum next Spring.

The 40,000-year-old animal, discovered two years ago in the Siberian Arctic soil, will be displayed in a climate-controlled case as part of a new "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" exhibit that will run from March 5 to Sept. 6 2010.  It will include more than 100 artifacts and specimens including CT scans and other information on the prehistoric creatures who roamed the Earth millions of years ago.

"She is amazingly intact," said Tom Swerski, the Field's project manager for the exhibit.

The specimen, whose body was exposed for a year above ground before discovery, remained preserved in a colonizing bacteria, said Dan Fisher, a University of Michigan paleontologist and lead curator of the new exhibit.

Lyuba was only one month old and 110 pounds when she was trapped in a muddy river bank and suffocated.  She still has skin, internal organs, toenails and hair on her carcass, the Sun-Times reports, and traces of her mother's milk were found in her stomach, researchers said

Lyuba is named after the wife of the Siberian reindeer herder who discovered her.

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