Russian to get $30,000 for baby mammoth found in permafrost

A Russian man who found the corpse of a baby mammoth will receive 1 million rubles ($31,000) for reporting the find to the Republican Mammoth Museum.

The corpse was found in Yakutia, a republic in Russia’s north-eastern Siberia, by the side of Khroma river, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reports Wednesday.

Igor Lebedev, employee of the local Pension Fund, noticed the mammoth, partially washed out of the ground by river water, while walking.

Specialists of the Republican Mammoth Museum studied the find and alleged it to be a young mammoth corpse some 15,000-30,000 years old. The animal, who died at about two years of age, had its head, legs and some intestines well-preserved in the cold climate of Yakutia.

According to the republic’s legislation, Lebedev will now receive a reward of 1 million rubles. Authorities of the diamond-rich region announced the reward to avert the mammoth corpses being sold on the black market rather than being given for research.

In the past few years, mammoths have regularly been found in Russia. In 2004, the corpse of a one-year-old mammoth was found in Yakutia; in 2007, an extremely well-preserved six-month-old female was found in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area.