Ben Madilynn
- Gold miners in the Yukon have made a habit of finding ancient fossils and mummified animals for scientists as their equipment plows through permafrost.
- Recent finds include a fully mummified woolly mammoth, a 57,000-year-old wolf pup and a 30,000-year-old squirrel.
- Government of Yukon paleontologists recover over 5,000 fossils from mines annually.
Gold miners have been moonlighting as paleontologists in the permafrost of Canada’s Yukon Territory. With over 5,000 fossils discovered annually by miners carving through the frozen earth, finding fully intact remains from tens of thousands of years ago is becoming almost commonplace.
Miners have uncovered everything from a 30,000-year-old, balled-up squirrel to a 57,000-year-old wolf pup likely killed when its den collapsed on top of it. One of the key finds, though, was in 2022 when a group of miners working on Eureka Creek dug a fully mummified woolly mammoth out of the permafrost.
“As they’re actively gold mining,” Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Government of Yukon, told Business Insider, “they’re constantly uncovering the remains of Ice Age animals like woolly mammoths.”
Zazula said that now when miners find fossils or bones, they simply set them aside for him to come pick up later, only calling the paleontologist immediately when they think they have something truly special to report. “Using all this heavy equipment,” Zazula said, “they do all the excavation, and we collect all the fossils that are turned up as a result of that.”
These exciting finds can aid in deeper research and make for impressive museum displays, such as the 30,000-year-old squirrel from the Klondike goldfields found in 2018 that recently debuted on display at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse.
The squirrel find is most unique in that it took an X-ray to even discover what the frizzy brown ball really was. “It’s not quite recognizable until you see these little hands and these claws, and you see a little tail, and then you see ears,” Zazula told the CBC.
Zazula said that some people get most excited when finding large tusks or skulls, but discovering a fully intact squirrel, where you can see its face, skin and hair, proves “visceral,” he said. “It brings it so to life.” The squirrel species still lives in the Yukon, so locating underground nests is common, but finding fully preserved mummified remains is not.
The baby woolly mammoth, named Nun cho ga, believed to be over 30,000 years old, was frozen in permafrost and is considered the first near-complete and best-preserved mummified woolly mammoth found in North America.
“There will be one thing that stands out in a person’s entire life,” Brian McCaughan, co-founder of Treadstone Gold, the company that discovered the specimen, said in a statement in 2022, “and I can guarantee you this is my one thing.”
Zazula said in a statement that when they found the woolly mammoth, it was a dream come true.
The landscape around the mammoth leads experts to believe it was buried in a landslide.
There’s also a caribou calf from 2016, which originally had folks thinking was just a Gold Rush dog. “We’re like, eh, I don’t know,” Zazula told Business Insider. “Those teeth look pretty wolf-like.”
Then you have the wolf pup with soft tissue and fur all still intact. Found in what was likely a collapsed den, the pup was only 7 weeks old when it died.
As the Yukon becomes the new Siberia in terms of fascinating finds—“We were constantly getting jealous of the cool stuff found in Siberia,” Zazula told Business Insider—the seemingly mundane is helpful in ongoing research.
“We drive back with truckloads of skeletons,” Zazula said. They all get categorized and are open to researchers worldwide. The genetic testing of the bones can open new areas of research, such as tracing the movement of ancient horses. The chance to look further and clearer into the distant past, for some, is more valuable than gold.
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
