Wooly mammoth blood recovered from 15,000-year-old frozen carcass

Washington: Scientists have found blood from the frozen body of a 10,000 to 15,000 year old mammoth discovered on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. The blood was so well preserved that it flowed freely from the ancient mammal - carcass of a female mammoth in good preservation on Lyakhovsky Islands of Novosibirsk archipelago - according to the scientists. Scientists with the Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, North-Eastern Federal University, and the Russian Geographical Society announced the amazing news on Wednesday, Fox News reported. Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the expedition and chairman of the Mammoth Museum, revealed that the blood is very dark, and it was found in ice cavities below the belly. He said that when they broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Grigoriev noted that the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to - 10 degrees Celsius [19.4 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit]. So, they assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties. The fragments of muscle tissues, which they found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat, Grigoriev said, totally unlike meat that is centuries old. Wooly mammoths are thought to have died out around 10,000 years ago, although scientists think small groups of them lived longer in Alaska and on Russia`s Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. ANI