Permafrost mummies are unlocking the secrets of prehistory

The ivory hunters knew they had found something special. It was 2020 and they were tunnelling into the banks of the Badyarikha river in Siberia. The permanently frozen soil of the river basin is a rich hunting ground for woolly mammoth tusks, which fetch a pretty price on the Chinese ivory market. Occasionally, however, rarer treasures turn up – more complete remains of mammoths and other long-dead animals.

This, however, was on a different planet. Inside a block of ice, the prospectors spotted a furry carcass unlike anything they had seen before. They alerted scientists, and eventually the ice block reached Alexey Lopatin at the Borissiak Paleontological Institute in Moscow for analysis. Last year, he and his team concluded that the remains were those of a juvenile scimitar-toothed cat, an animal only distantly related to living cats, and one that hunted like no predator does today.

“For the first time in the history of palaeontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied,” says Lopatin. “It’s a fantastic feeling.”

And it is one that might become more familiar to palaeontologists in the years ahead. Although frozen mummies have been emerging from the permafrost of Russia and North America for two centuries, we entered a golden age of discovery about 15 years ago. In that time, some of the finest known woolly mammoth mummies have come to light, as well as the first mummies of predators including…