音频下载[点击右键另存为]
At just a few months old, she’s attracting an awful lot of interest. Lyuba, the baby mammoth is the best-preserved prehistoric animal ever found. She might just be a baby, experts reckoned she drowned at the tender age of three or four months, but she’s been around a while. It's thought she died 37,000 years ago. The discovery last year in Siberia's caused a huge amount of excitement for scientists who hope she holds the key to building a genetic map of extinct animals. All her internal organs have been well preserved and using specialist equipment, they’ve been able to see right inside- heart, liver, veins and all.
The president of the International Mammoth Committee, yes, there is one, knows this find is something special. “This Lyuba discovery is something unique that never happened before. And a lot of specialists, a lot of scientists want to participate in this program, and would like to be more involved in this program.”
As a result, she’s guarded no worse than a royal and kept in a special container at sub-zero temperatures. It’s unlikely we'll be seeing mammoths like this walking around in the near future, but it could lead to some extinct animals being reproduced. Lyuba was named after the wife of a Russian hunter who made the discovery. But if you want to see her, you may have to pack those thermal thermals, she’s going on display in Salekhard in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region where she was found.
WORDS IN THE NEWS
1. mammoth : n-count
A mammoth was an animal like an elephant, with very long tusks and long hair, that lived a long time ago but no longer exists.
2. tender : adj
If you say that someone does something at a tender age, you mean that they do it when they are still young and have not had much experience.
eg: He had become attracted to the game at the tender age of seven