An 8-year-old girl discovered the bones of a woolly mammoth and a prehistoric bison after a landslide on the banks of a river in western Russia. An 8-year-old girl in Russia discovered a set of mammoth leg bones as well as a vertebra from a prehistoric bison while fishing with her father on the banks of the Oka River near Novinki in western Russia.

According to translated Russian news, Maryam Mirsaitova noticed a number of strange objects that had become trapped near a recent landslide. Her father sent photographs to the nearby Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve in the hope that researchers could identify his discoveries.

It turned out that he had found the condyle, or knee joint, and the underside of the thumb of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). The bones were reasonably well preserved, with spongy tissue exposed by degradation in the sediment. The size of the bones indicated that they belonged to a large adult mammoth. The researchers suggested that the animal probably lived about 100,000 years ago.

Woolly mammoths were common in the cold regions of northern Europe and Asia beginning about 700,000 years ago, and later in northern North America about 100,000 years ago. In the region where Maryam found the fossils, mammoths likely persisted until about 10,000 years ago, when the end of the Ice Age caused these cold-adapted megafauna to lose their habitat and food sources. Human intervention may have hastened their extinction.

Relict populations lived on Wrangel Island in Russia until about 4,000 years ago, where they became isolated and probably disappeared due to the effects of inbreeding.

Russia is rich in mammoth fossils, especially in Siberia. Some specimens have even been mummified, as a result of the freezing environmental conditions that slow down decomposition. It is noteworthy that in 2007 a mummified baby mammoth was discovered on the Yamal Peninsula, which was later named Lyuba.

Maryam’s finds also included a vertebra from what is likely a steppe bison (Bison priscus), which thrived in Europe, Asia and North America during the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). It is an ancestor of the modern European bison (Bison bonasus) and American bison (Bison bison).

In a translated post on VK, the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve said Maryam had also found a bone belonging to an animal that has not yet been identified. Museum staff urged other people who find fossils to come forward and report it to scientific institutions. Many fossils end up in private hands and are therefore unavailable for study. Lyuba, for example, was exchanged by the cousin of the reindeer breeder who discovered her for a pair of snowmobiles. She was later recovered by police, then transferred to a Russian museum, and then travelled the world as part of an exhibition on mammoths.