SCIENCE
Researchers dissect a 3,500-year-old bear preserved in Siberian permafrost End-shutdown
Russian researchers are dissecting a nearly 3,500-year-old brown bear that was almost perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost.
The bear underwent a necropsy after reindeer herders discovered her on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island in the Arctic in 2020.
It was found just east of the Bolshoy Etherican River and has therefore been called the Etherican brown bear.
The extreme temperatures in the area helped preserve the bear’s soft tissues for 3,460 years, as well as the remains of its last meals.
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Scientists perform an autopsy on a fossil brown bear with a geological age of 3,460 years, found in the permafrost of northern Yakutia by reindeer herders in 2020, in Yakutsk, Russia, on February 21, 2023. (REUTERS/Michil Yakovlev)
The 5.09-foot-tall, nearly 172-pound bear had ingested birds and plants.
The team cut away the bear’s skin, with tissue and fat visible, and the scientists examined its brain and internal organs. They used a vacuum cleaner to suck up the dust from the skull bones.
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A woman looks at a diorama at the Yakutsk State Museum of History and Culture in Yakutsk, Russia, on July 2, 2019. Melting permafrost is altering the landscape of Siberia, including the region’s largest city, Yakutsk, and altering its economy. ((Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images))
Maxim Cheprasov, head of a laboratory at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia, said the bear was probably between two and three years old and had died from an injury to its head. spine.
A brown bear (Ursus arctos beringianus) walks on the Kamchatka Peninsula ((Photo by: Valerio Ferraro/REDA&CO/Universal Images Group via Getty Images))
It is not clear how the bear got to the island, which is separated from the mainland. Melting permafrost has been altering the Siberian landscape.
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“Genetic analysis has shown that the bear does not differ in mitochondrial DNA from the modern bear from north-east Russia: Yakutia and Chukotka,” Cheprasov told Reuters, noting that the finding is “absolutely unique.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
