Farmers unearth 60,000-year-old MAMMOTH in family gravel pit: Rare skeleton of giant Ice Age creature is 90% complete

A family were left stunned when they discovered the skeleton on a 60,000-year-old mammoth in their firm’s gravel pit. The almost complete set of fossils was uncovered in May when Marty McEwen and his grandson Ethan Beasley were digging at the family business in Texas. After Mr McEwen hit a 6ft-long (1.8m) tusk with an excavator, the pair alerted nearby palaeontologists who carefully removed layers of mud which are millennia old.

Experts believe the creature’s relatively small size – it would only have been around 9ft (2.7m) tall – shows it is a female mammoth. Tom Vance, a palaeontologist from nearby Navarro College, Texas, believes the animal died after she fell on her left side. Remarkably it appears as if the clearly visible skull, ribs and lower jaw have been relatively untouched bar a few missing leg bones.

The skeleton has been donated by the McEwen’s to the nearby Perot Museum, Texas where it will be examined thoroughly. To protect the precious fossil during this process, the museum and McEwen family have chosen not to disclose the excavation site.

Woolly mammoths finally died out in eastern Siberia around 4,000 years ago. Resurrecting a prehistoric creature might seem like a sci-fi dream, but scientists say they have taken a step towards cloning the extinct woolly mammoth. They expect to extract ‘high quality DNA’ from a 43,000 year old carcass found in Siberia. The announcement was made after finding a female mammoth last year in permafrost in Russia’s diamond region of the Sakha Republic, which is also known as Yakutia.

source: Daily Mail 

to be left stunned – ledöbbenni
skeleton – csontváz
gravel pit – kavicsbánya
fossil – kövület, fosszília
to dig – ásni
tusk – agyar
layer – réteg
expert – szakértő
untouched – érintetlen
bar – kivéve
to donate – adományozni
precious – értékes
to disclose – felfedni
excavation – ásatás
to resurrect – feltámasztani
to clone – klónozni
extinct – kihalt, kipusztult
DNA – DNS
carcass – tetem
permafrost – állandóan fagyott talaj 

Match the words with the definitions.

answers: 1-c 2-a 3-d 4-e 5-b

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-GB
X-NONE
X-NONE

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