Foundations Reading 11A

Chap 21

Reading 11A THE MAMMOTH'S TALE The strange animal in the ice looked like it was sleeping. Ten-year-old Kostia Khudi and his brother had never seen anything like it. Their father, a reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi, went to ask a friend for advice. But when he returned, the body had disappeared. Yuri soon found the animal's body leaning against a store in a nearby town. While he was away, his cousin had sold it to the store owner. Dogs had eaten part of the tail and ear. But it was still in almost "as close to perfect condition as you can imagine," says scientist Daniel Fisher. The police came to help. The body was taken by helicopter to a museum. The animal was a baby mammoth from the Ice Age. It was female, so the scientists named it after Yuri's wife. From Siberia, the mammoth was sent to the Netherlands and Japan. Scientists there studied it in detail. Studies of her teeth and tusks showed she was just one month old when she died. Research has also shown us the sequence of events that led to her death. Lyuba fell and died near a muddy river. The mud helped keep her body frozen until she was found, 40,000 years later. Scientists hope that further studies will help explain how mammoths like Lyuba lived. They also want to know why mammoths became extinct.

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