Scientists poke frozen mammoth, liquid blood squirts out

Liquid mammoth blood.

Semyon Grigoriev/Northeastern Federal University

The frozen remains of a mammoth have been discovered on an island north of Siberia—with blood that is still liquid.

The 10,000-year-old beast was found on one of the Lyakhovsky Islands in the Novosibirsk archipelago off the northern coast of Siberia. Researchers from the Northeastern Federal University in Yakutsk poked the remains with an ice pick and, incredibly, blood flowed out.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat," said Semyon Grigoriev, chairman of the university's Museum of Mammoths and head of the expedition. "The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying (sic) in pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of tundra. We found a trunk separately from the body, which is the worst-preserved part."