Travis Delavsky went out looking for gold, but he found something even more valuable.
The Treadstone Gold miner climbed into his backhoe on June 21 just before noon and headed toward the river in the Yukon’s Klondike fields, where he began scraping the black earth.
“I put the gutter in the wall, pulled it out and looked down,” he said during a briefing on Wednesday. “And there was something looking at me.”
He jumped out of his machine to take a closer look while calling his supervisor, Brian McCaughan, on the radio to report that he had “found a body,” he said.
At first, Delawski said he thought it was a buffalo.
“But then I went down and looked at it a little closer and it had a trunk. And then as soon as it happened, I was like, ‘Brian, it’s a baby woolly mammoth.'”
The Yukon government said the animal was found in Tr’ondek Hwech’in Traditional Territory and is the most complete and best-preserved mammoth found in North America.
Tr’ondek Hwech’in elders named the mammoth Nun cho ga, which means “big baby animal” in the language of the Han nation.
Georgette McLeod, Han language administrator for the nation, said elders must find a way to mark the animal’s importance not only as a living being but also as a baby.
“The history of the Han language goes back quite far, but there is no name for mammoth because it does not exist in the Han language,” she said.
“We wanted to make sure that there was a name associated with the baby, but it also meant that it was a very large animal that had walked these lands for several years.”
Brian Groves, senior manager of Yukon Heritage, said preliminary examinations indicated that Nun Cho Ga was a female and was between 30 and 35 days old when she died.
It was frozen in permafrost about 30,000 years ago.
The animal is about 140 centimeters long and has well-preserved hair, trunk and small claws that are not hardened.
McCaughan, owner of Treadstone Gold, said when he went to look at the animal, he expected to see “broken bones” that are commonly found in the area.
“I went to see the bones and it had fresh skin and hair and it looked like it had died a week ago,” he said with a laugh.
The significance of the discovery sinks in for him a little more every day, even nearly a month after it was found, he said.
“What a crazy amazing find,” he said, shaking his head.
There was a storm at the end of the day with lightning “falling around us” and “rain pouring sideways,” he recalled.
“It was an experience that just grows on you and you get excited about it every day because you connect.”
There is something in everyone’s life that stands out, and McCaughan said the day he saw Nun cho ga was his.
“It’s absolutely my No. 1 for the rest of my life,” he said.
Geoff Bond, a manager with the Yukon Geological Survey, said Nun Cho Ga likely died near a small stream that exits a side hill into Eureka Creek.
“Subsequently, it was probably buried by a mudflow that came down during a storm,” he said. “Probably no different than the storm we experienced on June 21 when we rebuilt it. That in itself is pretty important I think.”
The men placed Nun Cho Ga in an excavator bucket after she was discovered and covered her with tarps and blankets to keep the body cold.
Woolly mammoths once roamed the Northern Hemisphere but became extinct about 10,000 years ago due to warming temperatures and overhunting.
Ross McPhee, senior curator in the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, said the animal could offer insight into the rate of development of baby mammoths because the only information they have comes from elephants, their distant relatives.
Because mammoths lived at a high latitude, life would be much more dangerous than if they were in the tropics, he said.
“So what kinds of adaptations did woolly mammals have for their babies so that they could mature perhaps faster than today’s elephants.”
Until a plan is drawn up for next steps, Groves said Noon Cho Ga will remain in a freezer, many miles from where she was found.
“At this point, Nun cho ga has been frozen for more than 30,000 years and is being stored under stable conditions,” he said. “And really, we’re in no rush to determine what the next steps are in terms of research or conservation activities.”
– By Hina Alam in Vancouver
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 13, 2022.
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