The perfectly preserved remains of a 9,000-year-old bison mummy have yielded a treasure trove of data for scientists to study.
According to LiveScience, the steppe bison mummy was found in 2011 by the Yukagir tribe in Siberia. It was transported to the Yakutian Academy of Sciences for further study.
It turned out to be the most complete bison mummy ever found, LiveScience said, and scientists were able to collect samples of its organs and, for the first time, intact brain tissue.
"Normally, what you find with the mummies of megafauna in North America or Siberia is partial carcasses. They're partly eaten or destroyed because they're lying in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years," Olga Potapova, of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in South Dakota, who studied the mummy, told LiveScience. "But the mummy was preserved so well that it [earned] a record for the level of its preservation."
"The Yukagir bison mummy became the third find out of four now known complete mummies of this species discovered in the world, and one out of two adult specimens that are being kept preserved with internal organs and stored in frozen conditions,"
Potapova told Science Daily.
The find is important in helping scientists understand bison and their habitat.
"The exclusively good preservation of the Yukagir bison mummy allows direct anatomical comparisons with modern species of Bison and cattle, as well as with extinct species of bison that were gone at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary," Dr. Evgeny Maschenko, another project scientist, from the Paleontological Institute in Moscow (Russia), told Science Daily.
"Anatomy, physiology, genetics these give us very good information to construct the bison's habitat, behavior and style of life. If we get all this information, we'll be able to pin down the real reasons for the extinction of the species," Potapova told LiveScience.
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