Crack the Enigma of a Mummified Creature Dating Back 30,000 Years!

X-ray scans have revealed that the grapefruit-sized lump is actually a 30,000-year-old Ice Age gopher mummy.

This mysterious ball of fur was found by a gold miner in 2018 in the Klondike gold fields near Dawson City, Yukon, according to the Yukon-Beringia Clearinghouse.

“It’s completely unrecognizable until you see these little hands and these claws and you see a little tail and then you see ears,” Grant Zazulla, a paleontologist with the Yukon government, told CBC.

X-rays solve the mystery of Mummified creature 30,000 years old https://t.co/ptBTxQzrMD

— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) April 12, 2023

Grant took the ball to his veterinarian, Jess Heath, for further testing. Heath took X-rays and showed that the ball of frozen hair was actually a small squirrel curled up in the Arctic. He probably died in hibernation, possibly within the first year of his existence.

The current Klondike goldfields in the Yukon have been covered in permafrost — frozen soil — since the Ice Age. This makes the area ideal for preserving creatures that died at that time – hair, nails and everything else.

Previously, gold diggers found a mummified wolf cub and an immaculately preserved mammoth there.

Such discoveries are likely to become more common as global temperatures continue to rise due to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. This causes the ice to melt, revealing everything from mummified creatures to viruses and anthrax deposits.

This squirrel was found in the traditional territory of the Khweh Tr’ondek people.in. This is the same species of arctic ground squirrel that still lives in the Yukon. And the squirrel looks more like a groundhog than a squirrel.

These creatures make nests underground for hibernation. Many of these nests have been preserved since the Ice Age.

The Yukon-Beringia Interpretation Center published images of the mummy and its x-rays on the website “.facebookAnnouncement that the sample will be presented soon.

Source: Science Alert

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