Canada's Yukon River.
Mummified corpses are not just found in ancient Egyptian tombs . Heading northwest from ancient Egypt, one enters a region of modern England where bog bodies are sometimes found - well-preserved corpses (mummies) that have soaked in the natural landscape for thousands of years.
It turns out that if one ventured thousands of miles west from ancient Egypt, one would find even older mummified bodies. As the Guardian reports: A miner encountered the mummified body of a young woolly mammoth in a Klondike gold mine. Although the mammoth's small body suggests that it was young at the time of its death, it is thought to have been around for at least 35,000 years.
Grant Zazula, the official paleontologist for the Yukon , emphasized the importance of the discovery, calling it "the most important discovery in North American paleontology."
"She has a trunk. She has a tail. Her ears are small," Zazula said in an interview with CBC News. "She had a small prehensile hook at the end of her snout that she could use to grab grass."
According to the Guardian article, scientists estimate that the mammoth was just over a month old at the time of her death. This is the second time a baby mammoth carcass has been found. In 2007, the first intact mummy of a baby mammoth was discovered in Russia.
