BABY LYUBA, THE WORLDS MOST COMPLETE AND BEST-PRESERVED WOOLLY MAMMOTH

She is 42,000 years old and her Australian debut has gone a long way. First, it was restored to its grave for so long from the frozen dirt of Siberia. She was then put in a cabinet at a small museum in Russia and flown to the Australian Museum’s humidity-controlled cube.

Mammoths – Giants of the ice age

Mammoths – Ice Age Riesen’s only at the Australian Museum from 17 November 2017 will be brought back to life in the ice age of woolly mammals.

The most complete and best-preserved woolly mammoth of the world, Baby Lyuba has come to Sydney. With her skin and inner organs intact, she is in exceptional condition. Even in her tummy, scientists detected her mother’s milk.

Finally, as the centrepiece of the Mammoth – Giants of Ice Age display, we will be able to view her. We will see her.

Lyuba, who died 35 days ago, is a national treasure house in Russia and too frequently the government is unwilling to let it out. This is just the sixth time she was expelled to the South Hemisphere by Shemanovsky Museum.

Yuri Khudi, a Siberian reindeer herder, originally discovered this mammoth in 2007 and found it on a muddy bank of the Yuribey River. She was gone; somebody else first had come there when he brought a team of scientists back to recover her.

The crew traced her deep into the freezing tundra of Siberia. At the door of a business, she was supported. The shopkeeper has apparently purchased it from Mr Khudi’s relative for two snowmobiles and food worth a year.

“And a dog came along and bit off her dick and ear as she was standing up. If only she would be fully intact for that,” says Trevor Ahearn, artistic producer of the Australian Museum.

Lyuba is love in the Russian language. (Lay-oo-bah). The museum decided to gather up her with replicas that would have surrounded and protected the herd in its life of enormous, dangerous adulation mammals.

Her feet are supposed to have stagnated in a muddy hole along the Siberian bank. Lyuba slid under the surface, where mud squeaked her lips and trunk until her mother was able to throw her out.

But the mud that murdered her also included acid barriers around her body and germs, which really hit her. When the river froze, it was kept flawlessly.

Lyuba would grow to moreover three metres in height and five tonnes had Lyuba lived a gigantic life for 60 years. She had devoured up to 180 kilos of grass and 80 litres of water every day to maintain this bodyweight. Mammoths lived in the late Paläolithic era, from around 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC, when Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa.

Small ears and thick, woolly hair have been specifically suited for the circumstances. They ate and barked and travelled over Europe, North America and Siberia.

Lyuba was therefore the first one to visit our shores and a good deal of what director Kim McKay calls “cultural diplomacy” had to come through at the Australian Museum. The Shemanovsky Museum and the Russian Government participated in negotiations.

Mr Ahearn says: “One of the first things we had to do before we took Lyuba here is to provide our Russian colleagues with the utmost certainty that it wouldn’t be taken because there is some dispute about who owns it.

“Her relationship with an energy firm that helped to transfer her to a museum in Russia is a bit contentious. Paranoia, I believe. Russia’s under some strain, so I don’t know if she’s founded. Russia is under some pressure. It’s all pretty foggy.” There are many misconceptions.

The prospect of mammoth cloning

There are two conflicting explanations about the extinction of mammals approximately 10,000 years ago by scientists. Both have essential facts about the current environment – and maybe carry a message as to why we shouldn’t try to return mammals.

Climate change is the first theory. By closing the ice age about 10,000 BC, the region where these frigid creatures could thrive might have been significantly restricted.

Over-hunting is the second theory. With their tonnes of fat, mammoths would have constituted an enormously important source of food for people who had created sharp spears for hunting them. Scientists believe that the mammoth is the first species managed to extinguish.

Cloning with mammoths has long captivated public imagination and a section dedicated to the opportunities. Up to now, roughly 70% of our mammoth DNA has been sequenced such that the raw material is not yet available. But we should not even, David Alquezar argues, manager of the genetic laboratory of the Australian Museum.