TOKYO, July 13 (Itar-Tass) - Unique mammoth remains found in Yakutia in 2010, are presented to the public for the first time at an exhibition in the Pacifico Expocentre in Japan’s city of Yokohama. The exhibition opens on Saturday.
"This is the first ever opportunity in the world to see a mammoth in such a good condition," one of the organisers of the exhibition said on the eve of its opening.
Yuka mammoth, as it was nicknamed by Russian palaeontologists, gained worldwide fame because his remains preserved very well after 39 thousand years in the permafrost. From Russia to Japan, Juka was taken by a ferry. For the public display, the animal’s carcass - five meters in length and a height of three meters - was put into a glass booth, inside which the temperature is maintained at minus 10 degrees. The exposition also shows another representative of the prehistoric fauna - a woolly rhinoceros, which lived at the times of the mammoths.
Yuka’s remains were found in summer of 2010 on the shore of the Laptev Sea near the village of Yukagir in Yakutia’s Ust-Yanskiy region. Scientists say at the time of death the animal was about ten years old. The reason for this early death must have been an attack of predators. Based on the nature of injuries, archaeologists concluded that the primitive people managed to fight off the carcass of a mammoth from predators.
The exposition in Yokohama will continue through to September 16. During this time, besides the audience, Japanese scientists who are studying the possibility of cloning prehistoric animals will see Yuka’s. Earlier, the local Kinki University and the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha /Yakutia/ signed an agreement to conduct joint research in the field of cloning mammoths. In 2012, a group of Russian-Japanese researchers found the first fragments of well-preserved bone marrow in other mammoth remains, which had been recovered during excavations near the village of Batagai in northern Yakutia. This finding was a major scientific success, as usually the bone marrow is found severely damaged due to a long stay in the permafrost, and therefore it becomes unsuitable for production of biologically active materials. Now, Japanese scientists are going to see if it will be possible to find necessary materials in Yuka’s remains to clone a mammoth.