Mummified bison uncovered in Siberia

© Dr. Gennady Boeskorov

Researchers have uncovered the several thousand year old, mummified remains of an extinct species of bison in a region of eastern Siberia known as the Yana-Indigirka Lowland, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) in Berlin, Germany.

The mummy was a near-complete specimen of Steppe bison and was discovered by a team of experts led by Dr. Natalia Serduk of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The creature is reportedly 9,300 years old and has a complete brain, heart, blood vessels, digestive system and even intact fur, though the researchers explained that some of the organs have shrunk significantly over time. A necropsy of the animal found no obvious cause of death.

"Normally, what you find with the mummies of megafauna in North America or Siberia is partial carcasses. They're partly eaten or destroyed because they're lying in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years," Olga Potapova of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in South Dakota told Live Science reporter Elizabeth Palermo. "But the mummy was preserved so well that it [earned] a record for the level of its preservation."

According to Discovery News reporter Jennifer Viegas, the creature has been dubbed the 'Yukagir bison mummy' based on the region where it was discovered, and while the exact cause of its demise cannot be established, Dr. Serduk's team believes that the lack of fat around its abdomen indicates the creature could have died from starvation.

"The exclusively good preservation of the Yukagir bison mummy allows direct anatomical comparisons with modern species of bison and cattle, as well as with extinct species of bison that were gone at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary," Dr. Evgeny Maschenko of the Paleontological Institute in Moscow, one of the researchers involved in the project, said in a statement Thursday.

Compared to the bison species currently found in the US, the Steppe bison (which died out shortly after the Ice Age) sported far larger horns and a second back hump, Viegas said. Bison such as this one were common features in Stone Age cave art, and the remains of a woolly rhino, a 35,000-39,000-year-old horse, and a mammoth were also found at in the same region as this new bison mummy was discovered, she added.

"The Yukagir bison mummy became the third find out of four now known complete mummies of this species discovered in the world, and one out of two adult specimens that are being kept preserved with internal organs and stored in frozen conditions," said Potapova.

"The next steps to be done include further examination of the bison's gross anatomy, and other detailed studies on its histology, parasites, and bones and teeth," she added. "We expect that the results of these studies will reveal not only the cause of death of this particular specimen, but also might shed light on the species behavior and causes of its extinction."

As Dominique Mosbergen of The Huffington Post pointed out, this is not the first time that scientists have discovered prehistoric bison remains. In 2012, a pair of researchers from the University of Alaska researchers found a nearly-complete Steppe bison skeleton that had died out approximately 40,000 years ago, calling it "the kind of thing we've always dreamed about finding."

As for the new study, Dr. Serduk, Dr. Maschenko and Potapova were joined on the project by researchers from the Yakutian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Russia; the Yakut State Museum of History and Culture of the North in Yakutsk, Russia; the Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow, Russia; the Yakutian State Agricultural Academy in Yakutsk, Russia; and the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute at the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Russia.