42.000-year-old foal entombed in ice still had liquid blood in its veins

The foal autopsy should reveal a lot about Pleistocene Siberia

 

A 42.000-year-old foal discovered frozen in Siberian permafrost contained a surprise: the oldest liquid blood on record.

This is the second time that a defrosted Ice Age animal has turned out to contain liquid blood, said Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the Mammoth Museum at North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. In 2018, Grigoriev and his colleagues extracted liquid blood from a 32,200-year-old mammoth carcass. That makes the foal’s blood the oldest ever found by 10,000 years.

(Researchers collect liquid blood from the ice age foal found frozen in Siberian permafrost)

Grigoriev and his colleagues are set on cloning a mammoth and other Pleistocene fauna, and they’re already trying to clone the foal, a member of an extinct species called the Lena horse. It’s a long shot, though, Grigoriev wrote in an email to Live Science.

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