As I come face-to-face with one of the cutest babies on Earth, my scientific detachment crumbles. Especially when that baby is a 1-month-old who died so quickly in the Siberian muds that her feet are still suspended in the act of struggle, her trunk still clogged up with the silts that suffocated her, and her belly still full of her mother's coagulated milk. The baby is Lyuba (pronounced Looba), a 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth. The only complete specimen in the world, she has made her first outing in Western Europe to be the centrepiece of an exhibition called Mammoths: Ice Age Giants, at London's Natural History Museum (NHM). On loan from the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard, Siberia, Lyuba stayed frozen in the ice until 2007 when a reindeer herder and his sons discovered her body on the bank of the Yuribei river in northern Russia. At 85 centimetres, she was the height of a human toddler, but she might have ended up over 3.1 metres high at the shoulder, weighed 5 or 6 tonnes, and lived for up to 60 years.
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