<i>Baby mammoth preserved perfectly in frozen soil </i>

This undated image released by the Field Museum in Chicago shows an international team of scientists perform an autopsy and DNA analysis on Lyuba, a wooly mammoth. Photo: AFP

Sucked to her death in a muddy river bed, a baby woolly mammoth spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost where her body was so perfectly preserved traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly.
Three years after her discovery by nomadic reindeer herders, Lyuba will head to Chicago as the star of a mammoths and mastodons exhibit at the world-famous Field Museum.
The exhibition, announced at mid-week, opens March 5 and will run through September 6. The Field Museum is the first US museum to display the prehistoric specimen.
"There's a visceral awe that takes hold of you in looking at a specimen like Lyuba, and the exhibition as a whole demonstrates how close we can come to knowing what these animals were like," said lead curator Daniel Fisher, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Michigan who is part of the international team studying the remains.