Baby mammoth Lyuba travels across the world
Despite the fact that over the past eight years the baby mammoth visited several countries, residents of other cities of Yamal got an opportunity to see her only this year. In 2008, the exhibit traveled to Japan, in 2010 it participated in an international project – a traveling exhibition "Mammoths and mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" arranged by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and Jersey City (USA). In 2012, she participated in the exhibition "Lyuba: Baby Mammoth of the Ice Age" in Hong Kong. In 2013, the exhibit took part for the first time in the Russian exhibition "Mammoths are coming..." at the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. In 2014, the Yamal finding was the focus of the exhibition "Mammoths: Ice Age Giants " at the Natural History Museum in London, as well as at the exhibition "The world through the eyes of a mammoth" in the World Ocean Museum in Kaliningrad.
A replica of the baby mammoth is also very popular. The replica participated in exhibitions at the Olympics in Sochi, in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Paris, and Berlin, as well as in cities and towns of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area.
The Shemanovsky Museum obtained this valuable exhibit in 2007. A baby mammoth named after the wife of Yuri Khudi, a reindeer herder, who found her, has become a boon for scientists around the world. According to numerous studies conducted by specialists from Russia, Japan, USA, France, and the Netherlands, sediment in the baby mammoth's trunk reveals she fell into a sticky mud hole and choked to death. Her age at the moment of death was about a month and at that time she used her mother's milk to feed. Her stomach and intestinal contents point to a practice used in today’s elephants as well: eating adult elephant feces (those children!) as a way to introduce needed bacteria for digestion. Moreover, it was confirmed for the first time that shortly after the birth (and possibly in the womb) mammoths had a well developed hump on the neck containing reserves of brown fat having the function of a heat controller.
42 000 years ago, in the course of the baby mammoth's life, there was a wooded steppe on the territory of her habitat dominated by cereals, and the forest area was shifted farther to the north as compared to the present time. Scientists believe that Lyuba belonged to the branch of woolly mammoths that migrated to North America across the isthmus existed at that time and then returned to their homeland.
Visitors of the exhibitions featuring a unique Yamal discovery learn about the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, Salekhard, the Shemanovsky Museum and the tundra dweller Yuri Khudi. The Museum employees believe that the baby mammoth Lyuba is not only a valuable artifact and a well-preserved evidence of the Ice Age, but also a kind of a guide that tells the world about Yamal, the peoples living in this land from the earliest times, which is still interesting, unusual and mysterious as it was tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.