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World's most complete preserved mammoth to go on display in London World's most complete preserved mammoth to go on display in London
(35 minutes later)
The world's most complete preserved mammoth will go on display at the Natural History Museum next month - the first time that the find has been shown in Western Europe. A 42,000 year old baby mammoth is set to go on display forthe first time in Western Europe next month at the Natural History Museum.
The baby mammoth, found in Siberia by a reindeer herder in 2007, is little larger than a dog, and has been nicknamed Lyuba. Lubya, who was named after the wife of the Serbian reindeer herder that found her, has been described as the most complete preserved mammoth in the world.
It is thought to have died 42,000 years ago while just a month old, and is the most comprehensive mammoth skeleton ever found. One month old when she died, the baby mammoth’s corpse was intact enough that fragments of her eyelashes remained as well as remnants of her mother’s milk in her stomach.
Experts believe that the female mammoth's body was buried in wet clay and mud which then froze, preserving it until she was found by Yuri Khudi and his sons while they were searching for firewood along the banks of the Yuribei river. "When they did the autopsy on her she is so complete that we could get a look at her insides and see her last meal,” Victoria Herridge, a  paleobiologist from the Natural History Museum in London, told the Sunday Times.
Lyuba is one of a number of mammoths to have been found close to the north-west Siberian river in recent years. "She had milk from suckling her mother and also remnants of faecal matter in her gut, which suggest she had been eating her mother's dung. This is something living elephants do as the dung provides the infants with microbes to help them ingest their food."
Until recently, Lyuba - named after Mr Khudi's wife, whose name is Russian for 'love' - was held by the Shemanovsky Museum in Russia, but will go on display to the British public on May 23. Lubya, which means ‘love’ in Russian, is thought to have died after stumbling into a salty marsh bog and slowly drowning in the mud. The mud then froze, preserving the body until herder Yuri Khudi and his son stumbled across it while searching for firewood by the Yuribei river in north-west Siberia.
Professor Adrian Lister, a mammoth researcher at the Natural History Museum, said: "It's an honour to be showcasing the world's best preservedmammoth for the first time in western Europe. Lubya will go on display from 23 May until 7 September 2014 as part of a new exhibition entitled Mammoths: Ice Age Giants. Other species in the exhibition will include the dwarf mammoth and the spiral-tusked Columbian mammoth.
"Lyuba is hugely important for helping us to understand the lives of ice age animals. This exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet this amazing creature from more than 40,000 years ago." Although some enthusiasts may be hoping that this remarkable specimen is well preserved enough to allow scientists to clone the mammoth, as Herridge notes Lubya’s DNA will have “deteriorated” significantly.
Visitors to the three-month-long exhibition will also have the opportunity to imagine life as a mammoth. "Tusk-jousting" and an artificial trunk which visitors can handle will be among the experiences available to curious museum-goers. Despite the widespread belief that DNA is easily preserved and resurrected, recent research has shown that the molecule only has a half-life of about 521 years, making Jurassic Park-style cloning an impossibility for now.
PA