It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields.
What he had stumbled upon would later be described by the territory’s palaeontologist as “one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world”: a stunningly preserved carcass of a baby woolly mammoth thought to be more than 35,000 years old.
