The Sopkarga mammoth, alternately spelled Sopkarginsky mammoth, and informally called Zhenya, after the nickname of its discoverer, is a

woolly mammoth The woolly mammoth (''Mammuthus primigenius'') is an extinct species of mammoth that lived during the Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with '' Mammuthus subp ...

carcass found in October 2012. It was discovered away from the Sopkarga polar weather station on the

Taymyr Peninsula The Taymyr Peninsula (russian: Таймырский полуостров, Taymyrsky poluostrov) is a peninsula in the Far North of Russia, in the Siberian Federal District, that forms the northernmost part of the mainland of Eurasia. Administrati ...

in Russia. ''

The Moscow News ''The Moscow News'', which began publication in 1930, was Russia's oldest English-language newspaper. Many of its feature articles used to be translated from the Russian language ''Moskovskiye Novosti.'' History Soviet Union In 1930 ''The M ...

'' refers to it as the best preserved mammoth find in the past 100 years. The remains are those of a male, aged 15 to 16 years, who died c. 48,000 years ago. They weigh over , comprising the right half of the body including soft tissue, skin and hair, the skull with one ear, a tusk, bones and reproductive organs. This find is the best-preserved of its kind since another mammoth was unearthed in 1901 near the Beryozovka River in

Yakutia Sakha, officially the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia),, is the largest republic of Russia, located in the Russian Far East, along the Arctic Ocean, with a population of roughly 1 million. Sakha comprises half of the area of its governing Far Eas ...

. This makes Zhenya the second-best preserved mammoth ever found. Over the course of a week, the frozen carcass was extracted using steam, axes, and picks. It was then transported by helicopter to

Dudinka Dudinka (russian: Дуди́нка; Nenets: Тут'ын, ''Tutꜧyn'') is a town on the Yenisei River and the administrative center of Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. It used to be the administrative center of Tay ...

, the capital of Taymyr, and placed in an ice chamber. Zhenya's hump appears to be composed of fat, similar to a camel's hump. The remains were found by 11-year-old Yevgeny Salinder who lives near the station. His nickname is "Zhenya".

References

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See also

References