A team of Russian scientists has performed an autopsy on a perfectly preserved brown bear mummy that lay in the frozen wilderness of eastern Siberia nearly 3,500 years ago. This was reported by Reuters. The bear’s carcass was discovered in 2020 by reindeer herders on Great Lyakovsky Island, part of the Novosibirsk Islands located in the Arctic Ocean about 4,600 kilometers east of Moscow.
“This discovery is completely unique: a complete carcass of a prehistoric brown bear,” Maxim Chbrasov of the Northeastern Federal University in Yakutsk said of the scientific discovery.
Extreme temperatures in the region have helped preserve the bear’s soft tissues for 3,460 years. And also the remains of the last food he ate – feathers of birds and plants. According to the description, the bear is 1.55 meters tall and weighs about 78 kilograms.
“For the first time ever, an animal carcass with soft tissues has reached the hands of scientists. Thus we have the opportunity to examine its internal organs and its brain,” Zebrasov describes. The scientist added, “The genetic analysis showed us that the bear does not differ in terms of mitochondrial DNA from the modern bear from northeastern Russia – Yakutsk and Chukotka.”
According to him, the bear was two to three years old and died of a spinal injury. It is unclear how she got to the island, now separated from the mainland by a fifty-kilometer strait. Perhaps you crossed the ice, or swam across it, or the island was part of the mainland at that time.
The Russian Far East has produced many mummies of prehistoric animals in recent years. The findings also help with thawing of permafrost due to climate change. In recent years, scientists have discovered mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave lion cubs there.
