Mammoth Find: Oil Workers in Siberia Find Remains of Woolly Mammoth

Oil company workers in the area noticed a strange object sticking out of an excavator bucket in the course of their work removing the top soil near a forest in the area, which turned out to be the mammoth's tusk.

The workers stopped their excavation work and began digging with hand shovels, managing to find other remains, including the second tusk, the tibia, ribs, and fragments of the animal's teeth and jaw. The mammoth was said to have been buried approximately three meters underground.

The oil company soon informed local experts about the find, with paleontology museum coordinator Anton Resviy arriving at the scene shortly after. Resviy estimated that the remains are at least 10,000 years old, and that the remains belong to a female who was approximately 30-40 years of age when she died.

Resviy told Russian media that carbon dating can help determine the animal's exact age, and further analysis to be conducted this summer will help determine whether it belonged to the European or North American subspecies. Specialists plan to study how the mammoth ended up in this area, and to find out, with the help of micropaleontological analysis, whether this was the animal's home, or whether it had migrated here.

The Khanty-Mansi region of Russia is rich in mammoth finds. The collection of the Museum of Nature and Man in Khanty-Mansiisk includes a mammoth vertebrae smashed by an ancient human-made weapon, serving as rare proof that people in Asia hunted the giants.