11-year-old boy finds frozen mammoth

An eleven-year-old boy, Zhenya Salinder, has found a frozen mammoth carcass while he was out walking with his family's dogs in northern Siberia.

The mammoth is well-preserved and was located 2,200 miles away from Moscow in Sopochnaya Karga. After alerting local officials of his find, experts from St. Petersburg came to carefully get the mammoth out of the frozen mud it was found in.

The experts, who named the mammoth Zhenya, after the boy that found it, said that when it died it was 16 year-old, was over 6 feet tall and wieghed in at around 500Kg.

The experts all work at the St. Petersburg Zoology Institute and have worked on other mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost before. Alexei Tikhonov leads the team and said that the mammoth could have been hunted and killed by ice age humans or a wild animal such as a lion. Another cause of death could have been a fight with a rival mammoth - in other words the expert doesn't really know at this point how it died!

Past investigators have tried eating the meat of found frozen mammoth and suffered no ill efects. The meat had essentially been in a natural deep freezer since the ice age.

Sergei Gorbunov, from the International Mammoth Committee, yes it really exists, said: "We had to use both traditional instruments such as axes, picks, shovels as well as such devices as this "steamer" which allowed us to thaw a thin layer of permafrost. Then we cleaned it off, and then we melted more of it. It took us a week to complete this task."

It is not known what will now happen with the mammoth. Most probably it will be shipped off to St Petersburg for further tests. It has been speculated that Russian scientists are extracting DNA from such finds and are attempting to clone a mammoth. Perhaps one day mammoths will again be roaming the Russian steppes!