46,000-year-old bird, frozen in Siberian permafrost, looks like it 'died a few days ago'

[Judi Lynn]

By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor 15 hours ago

Siberian permafrost preserved the body of this small ice age bird.


For the last 46,000 years, a small bird that died during the last ice age has sat frozen, shielded from decay and scavengers, until two Russian men hunting for fossil mammoth tusks discovered its body in Siberian permafrost.

The bird was in such good shape, it looked "like it [had] died just a few days ago," said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, who was with the ivory hunters, Boris Berezhnov and Spartak Khabrov, when they discovered the bird.

"[The bird] is in pristine condition," Dalén told Live Science in an email. The find is extraordinary because "small animals like this would normally disintegrate very quickly after death, due to scavengers and microbial activity."

The frozen flier is one-of-a-kind find, too: It's the only near-intact bird carcass documented from the last ice age, Dalén added.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/ice-age-bird-permafrost.html



Female horned lark

[BusyBeingBest]

1. That's cool! Also that they were able to identify it to an exact bird

that I have today as a backyard visitor.