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| Locked in the Siberian Permafrost for 40,000 Years, Discovery Channel Shares the Extraordinary Story of Lyuba – a Perfectly Preserved Woolly Mammoth – when WAKING THE BABY MAMMOTH Premieres November 29 |
| Posted
on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 - 06:42 PM |
Can a single month-old infant unlock scientific secrets held for thousands of years? Can this same baby inspire a spirit of cooperation crossing cultural and national boundaries? Yes, if the infant in question is Baby Lyuba – a nearly perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth that suddenly appeared on a Siberian riverbank. Cutting-edge science and Arctic adventure come together when WAKING THE BABY MAMMOTH premieres Sunday, November 29 at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. PT on Discovery Channel. This two-hour special presentation reveals the extraordinary investigation into Lyuba’s life and death at the end of the last Ice Age, and follows two men from vastly different worlds – from the Siberian tundra to the high-tech science lab – as they endeavour to solve the mystery of the riverbed mammoth.
In May 2007, nomadic reindeer herder Yuri Khudi is surprised to find the one-month-old baby female mammoth, just under a metre long, lying on the tundra in a remote corner of the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia. Khudi is an animist, who believes that every being has a soul, and that this creature from the world of the dead may bring misfortune to his family. His beliefs are so strong that he doesn’t dare touch the carcass.
But instinctually aware that such a discovery is rare and potentially important, he goes to great lengths to alert Russian authorities. Expert paleontologists rush to Siberia for a preliminary evaluation and unequivocally pronounce Baby Lyuba the best-preserved woolly mammoth – of any age – ever to emerge from the permafrost. About the same size as a large dog, experts believe she suffocated on the thick mud and she struggled to escape the muddy riverbank.
WAKING THE BABY MAMMOTH interweaves the stories of three main characters: Baby Lyuba (“live” and artfully rendered in CGI); Yuri Khudi, the Nenets nomad who found her; and renowned American paleontologist Dan Fisher, a key member of a scientific team working to unlock her secrets.
Challenging cultural assumptions, Fisher travels to Yamal to meet Khudi and learn about the land of the mammoth from this Arctic expert. Then, Khudi makes his first journey off the tundra to a major city to see why his discovery is so important to science. Solving the mystery of Lyuba’s origins forges a bond between these men whose vastly different life experiences are linked only by this ancient woolly mammoth.
A forensic investigation a year after Lyuba’s discovery takes the scientific team from a high-tech medical imagining lab in Tokyo to Saint Petersburg. In the Russian lab, a full-scale autopsy reveals the baby mammoth’s exquisite internal preservation and yields a number of “firsts” for mammoth science.
Following Baby Lyuba’s trail from her discovery site to labs across the globe, the investigators search for clues that will reveal how stayed so remarkably intact 40,000 years after her death, and what secrets her body may ultimately share about her life and the world of the woolly mammoth before the great extinctions.
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