Scientists have unveiled an extraordinary find — a lion cub found in the Arctic that may be the best preserved Ice Age animal ever found.
The female cub, nicknamed Sparta, was found by a local resident named Boris Berezhnev in 2018 along Russia's Semyuelyakh River.
Sparta, estimated to have died 28,000 years ago, was one of two lion cubs described in the study, published this week in the journal Quarternary.
The other was a male cub found by Berezhnev in 2017, just 15 metres from Sparta. At first, the researchers who recovered the cubs in Siberian permafrost thought they were siblings, but the male cub, named Boris, turned out to be much older — having died 43,000 years ago, radiocarbon dating showed.
During the last Ice Age, cave lions were a common predator throughout northern Eurasia and North America, including Canada. In fact, the first cave lion genome came from a bone from Yukon. The species went extinct about 14,000 years ago.
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