Oldest Preserved Woolly Mammoth Coming to Field Museum

By Lindsey Miller in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 2, 2009 9:05PM

The days are getting shorter, the weather is getting colder... so cold, in fact, that a woolly mammoth will soon be calling Chicago its temporary home. The best-preserved baby woolly mammoth ever found, named Lyuba, will be on exhibit beginning in March at The Field Museum. It will be the first time Lyuba has been shown in the U.S. since its discovery in 2007.

The 40,000-year-old preserved woolly mammoth will be the center of an exhibit, Mammoths and Mastadons: Titans of the Ice Age, which will run March 5 through Sept. 6, 2010 and feature full-scale models of Ice Age creatures, as well as fossils and tools made from mammoth bone and ivory. Remains from mammoths and mastadons are already featured in several permanent exhibits at the field museum, but Mammoths and Mastadons will focus on how these animals lived and their interactions with each other and with humans.

"Mammoths and Mastodons, with Lyuba at its center, makes natural history much more real to people. There's a visceral awe that takes hold of you in looking at a specimen like Lyuba, and the exhibition as a whole demonstrates how close we can come to knowing what these animals were like," says Daniel Fisher, lead curator of the exhibition.

Lyuba herself was found by a Siberian reindeer herder and two of his sons, and named after the herder's wife (pronounced Lee-OO-bah). Scientists determined she lived about 30 days, and most likely died of suffocation after being trapped in mud along the banks of a river. Her body was preserved due to an abundance of lactic-acid-producing bacteria which produced a "pickling" effect on her body. That, along with freezing, helped preserve her 110-pound and 45-inch-long body.

Lyuba and the rest of the exhibit will travel to 10 cities after making its Field Museum debut next year.