From woolly rhinos to wolves, brown bears to bison, many Ice Age animals have been recovered from the world’s permafrost. Apart from being slightly crushed and maybe a little bit nibbled, very often they’re in excellent condition.
In 2017, for example, scientists exhumed the body of a little cave lion cub, dubbed Sparta, from the frozen bank of a Siberian river. Its golden fur may have been muddy and matted, but its skin, soft tissue and organs were all intact. Lying on its side with eyes closed, it looked more like an animal that was asleep, than one that had been dead for 28,000 years.
Then there’s the two-month-old horse, that died around 35,000 years ago and was discovered in Siberia in 2018. Although some of its fur was missing, the animal was otherwise remarkably intact, with hooves, skin, a tail and nostril hair.
Many well-preserved woolly mammoths have been found, including one with grass in its mouth, one with its mother’s milk in its belly and one with faeces in its rectum. Scour the internet and you’ll find videos of people cutting into frozen mammoth corpses and retrieving what look like slices of steak. The meat looks red and fresh, but looks can be deceiving.
Although these Ice Age animals and their tissues look good at a superficial level, zoom in and it’s a different story. When living cells are frozen without cryoprotectant chemicals – as happens when an animal dies in a cold place – ice crystals form and rupture the cells.
Tissues and organs may still be intact, but the cells they’re made from aren’t. The last Ice Age ended around 11,000 years ago, meaning there has been plenty of time for this sort of cellular damage to occur. Although these ancient animals might look well-preserved at the macro level, at the micro level they’re in tatters.
So, the best-preserved Ice Age beasts, in my opinion, are the ones that not only look good superficially, but also have cells that remain relatively intact. These are likely to be the ones that died most recently, towards the end of the last Ice Age, and that have been frozen ever since.
If you don’t mind the fact that the back half of its body is missing, one candidate is a 9,000-year-old bison, discovered in the Russian Far East in 2022. Researchers from the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, East Siberia, performed an autopsy on the animal and are optimistic that its cells are intact enough to make it a viable candidate for cloning.
Don’t hold your breath though. There’s optimism and then there’s actually making it happen. Scientists have tried to clone various Ice Age animals and, so far, have failed. For cloning to work, the DNA inside the animals’ cells would need to be in tip-top condition, which it’s extremely unlikely to be – DNA deteriorates after death.
So for now, perhaps we should just enjoy these mummified relics for what they are: a fascinating window into our prehistoric past.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Ben Schofield) 'What are the best preserved Ice Age animals?'
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