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Yukon gold miners are unearthing mummified ancient creatures and truckloads of fossils from the Ice Age. Take a look.

September 11, 20240
X-ray scans revealed a well-preserved squirrel skeleton with its legs curled up.

Yukon Government

“I’m really impressed that someone recognized it for what it was. From the outside, it just kind of looks like a brown blob. It looks a bit like a brown rock,” Jess Heath, a veterinarian who conducted the X-ray, told CBC.

Like Zhùr, the squirrel probably died in its underground burrow.
An impeccably preserved baby mammoth, called Nun Cho Ga, is the crown jewel of Yukon paleontology.

Government of Yukon

As with most of these discoveries, gold miners found the mammoth within traditional Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory. The Indigenous nation’s elders were on the scene long before Zazula, who had to drive six hours to reach it.

“Doing what I do, it’s kind of like your dream come true. You get to actually see a mammoth for real, and it was very emotional,” Zazula said.

“I never thought I’d ever get that phone call,” he added.

Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in leadership named the mammoth Nun Cho Ga, meaning “big animal baby” in their Hän language.
A model of a woolly mammoth (not Nun Cho Ga) during installation for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo

Where the mammoth had been embedded in the permafrost, it was surrounded by fossilized grass and twigs, indicating it had probably been buried in a landslide.

The historic discovery of Nun Cho Ga finally put North America’s permafrost findings on par with Russia’s.
Professor Adrian Lister poses for photographs looking at Lyuba, a baby woolly mammoth discovered in Siberia.

Matt Dunham/AP Photo

In the Siberian permafrost, miners and reindeer herders have discovered intact mummies of all kinds of big Ice Age animals — from a wolf to a woolly rhinoceros to a , a Neolithic body dating to 3300 BC, discovered on a melting Alps glacier in 1991.

Permafrost could preserve similar human bodies. So far, early humans’ tools have been found in the frozen soil, but no Ice Age humans have turned up yet.

“It’d be exciting. It would change all of our lives and careers,” Zazula said.