Lyuba, the best-preserved mammoth calf ever discovered, is the star of the Field Museum’s latest exhibit, “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age,” which opened earlier this month.

The exhibit transports visitors back to the Ice Age to get a sense of how these huge extinct creatures lived, thrived and eventually died.

After walking past two 15-feet long mammoth tusks serving as the entrance to the exhibit, visitors are greeted by a large video screen depicting modern-day Chicago. Skyscrapers and buildings disappear and prairies emerge as the video rewinds 20,000 years to a time where mammoths and mastodons roamed the earth.

“The Proboscidea — mammoths, mastodons, and their relatives — have been major components of the world’s land fauna for tens of millions of years,” said Dan Fisher, curator of the exhibit and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan.

Creating the Field Museum’s latest exhibit was a three-year process involving museums and research institutions from around the world. Lyuba, the 110-pound, 4-foot-long baby mammoth is currently on loan from its home institution in Russia, the Shemanovskiy Museum and Exhibition Center.

“Lyuba is the best preserved, most complete specimen known,” Fisher said.

A reindeer herder and breeder in Northern Siberia discovered the mammoth calf in 2007. The body of the 30-day-old baby mammoth was found in the frozen soil, its hair and flesh still preserved. The animal, which was featured in National Geographic in April 2009, was named after the discoverer’s wife.

The Yamalo-Nenets region in northern Russia, where Lyuba was discovered, is an area roughly the size of Texas, half of which situated above the Arctic Circle.

“Most of our region is permafrost, and that could be the explanation of why this paleontological and archeological find was preserved so well,” Sergey Grishin, director of the Shemanovskiy Museum, told reporters March 2, through a translator.

Lyuba will be featured at the Field Museum until Sept. 6, when she will begin a 10-city tour around the world.

The exhibit began “with a set of ambitious, vague ideas to a concrete series of visual, tactile, and auditory experiences that do a wonderful job of capturing the sweep of history of what I think is one of the most interesting groups of mammals our earth has known,” Fisher said. Expect to see real bones, real tusks and models of the Ice Age mammals.

“The exhibition presents complex scientific information in a way that is enlightening, entertaining, and a lot of fun,” said Field Museum President John McCarter.

Walking through the exhibit, visitors are able to learn about the differences between mammoths and mastodons, where they lived, what they ate, how they interacted with humans and how they evolved.

Mammoths, the larger relatives of mastodons, weighed up to eight tons and stood more than 16 feet tall. The animals iconic curved tusks help differentiate them from the smaller mastodon, which had shorter, less curved tusks. The animals, although both herbivores, also had slightly different diets.

A special section at the end of the exhibit is dedicated to a relative of the mammoth.

“The last part of the exhibition focuses on the conservation and challenges that elephants now face around the world,” said Grishin.

Although elephants — the genetic cousins of mammoths — still roam the earth, the Field Museum’s latest exhibit stresses the importance of protecting species in danger of extinction.

“Proboscideans have been major factors in human history, serving at times as part of our subsistence base, objects of artistic expression, and now, as reminders of the impact our activities can have on the world around us,” Fisher said.

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By Ava from Leawood South
Posted: 09/14/2011 8:28 PM

Hey this is Ava. I have a question. Did you guys try to bring Lyuba back to life? Did it work what is she doing?