
Many years ago, I was doing a lectureship in Alaska when a young man said he had a fossil he wanted to give me. He said it was on the back porch of his home, but he neglected to tell me it was in the family freezer. His story was that he and some friends were on a canoe trip and found a tusk sticking out of the permafrost. Upon digging it out, they found it was a mammoth. Unfortunately, they cut off the head and put it in the family freezer. He wanted me to take it and get it out of the freezer, but that was impossible for me to do, so I think it ended up at the University of Alaska. I can imagine the mother’s reaction if she found that in her freezer. With climate change, finding prehistoric frozen animals in the permafrost is becoming more common.
USA Today published an article about a baby mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost. The picture shows a specimen very much like the one I described above. In November, scientists discovered the remains of a saber-toothed cat cub. Earlier in 2024, a wolf carcass was found.
Researchers have a problem protecting these prehistoric frozen animals because the meat is still edible. Left alone, birds and modern carnivores will eat it. Some natives who came to my lectureship programs talked about eating frozen carcasses. Various dating methods on these specimens show them as old as 50,000 years, yet the meat is still edible.
Researchers we talked to in Alaska did not have a good explanation as to how the specimens were frozen so quickly. Evolution assumes uniformitarianism – the belief that no process has operated in the past that is not going on today. The prehistoric frozen animals pose quite a challenge to that assumption. Research is ongoing, giving us more information about past climate and astronomical events that are NOT happening today.
— John N. Clayton © 2025
Reference: USA Today for 12/29/24