A team of scientists conducted an autopsy after reindeer herders found a brown bear, nearly perfectly preserved for 3,500 years in the permafrost of eastern Siberia, on a desolate Arctic island.
“This find is completely unique, the complete carcass of an ancient brown bear,” says Maxim Cheprasov, head of the laboratory of the Lazarev Mammoth Museum at the North-Eastern Federal University of Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.
The female was spotted in 2020 by a reindeer herder sticking out of the permafrost on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, part of the New Siberian archipelago about 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow.
Since it was found just east of the Bolshoy Eselikar River, it was named Eselika brown bear.
The extreme heat preserved the bear’s soft tissue for 3,460 years, as well as its last food, feathers and plant remains. The bear was one meter tall and weighed nearly 172 kilograms.
“For the first time, a corpse with soft tissues was in the hands of scientists, who had the opportunity to examine the internal organs and examine the brain,” Cheprasov said.
A team of Siberian scientists cut open the bear’s tough skin to allow scientists to examine the brain and internal organs for cytology, microbiology, virology, genetics and much more.
When dissecting this ancient beast, the bear’s pink tissue and yellow fat were clearly visible.
They also sawed off the skull, sucked the bone dust out of it with a hoover, and then removed the brain.
“Genetic analysis has shown that this bear’s mitochondrial DNA is indistinguishable from modern bears from northeastern Russia (Yakutia and Chukotka),” says Cheprasov.
This bear was probably 2–3 years old. The cause of death was a spinal cord injury.
But it’s unclear how the bear got to the island, which is separated from the mainland by a 31-mile strait. It may have crossed the ice, swam, or become part of the mainland.
The Lyakhovsky Archipelago is one of the world’s richest paleontological treasures, attracting scientists and ivory traders in search of woolly mammoths.
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