Emily Chan
In 1979, a pair of gold miners stumbled across the frozen carcass of a bison in Fairbanks, Alaska.
They quickly notified the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and the scientists there deemed it a rare find. It was the only known example of a Pleistocene bison that had been recovered from permafrost.
The bison lived during the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating showed that it was at least 36,000 years old, but Josh Reuters, the curator of archaeology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, claimed that it was at least 50,000 years old. The animal was identified as a steppe bison, a species that is no longer living.
A paleontologist named Dale Guthrie was instrumental in retrieving the carcass from its environment. At the time, he was a professor and researcher at the university.
He wanted to dig the bison out right away because he was afraid it might decompose now that it had been uncovered. However, the frozen ground made excavations extremely challenging.
So, he cut off the bison’s head near the neck and refroze it. Then, he waited until summer for the ice to melt before extracting the rest of the animal.
Once Guthrie and his team pulled out the whole bison from the ground, they noticed that it was covered in a blue, chalky coating.
The bison’s bluish appearance was due to a substance called vivianite, which is caused by phosphorous from the animal’s bones reacting with iron in the soil. Vivianite is a white compound, but it turns blue when it is exposed to air. This led the scientists to name the bison “Blue Babe.”
According to tooth and claw marks on the bison’s skin, it had died from an attack by a big cat that lived during the Ice Age. It is believed to be an ancestor of the African lion. The predator’s attack left wounds that exposed the bison’s ribs and spine.
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