In May 2007, winter still blanketed the tundra as two of Yuri Khudy’s sons searched for wood along the banks of the frozen Yuribei River, when they saw what they thought was a sick or dying reindeer. As night fell, the boys rushed to their family’s tent to tell their father about their discovery.

The next day, Yuri took a look for himself. The animal was a little over a metre long and appeared to have no tusks. But from its face extended what could only be called a trunk. Yuri recognised that this was an unusually well-preserved baby mammoth, but he was reluctant to touch the carcass. Like many Nenets, Yuri is an animist who believes that every living thing has a soul, and disturbing the remains of a dead mammoth is said to bring misfortune.

At first, Yuri could not decide what to do. He visited a sacred site that has been in his family for generations to make an offering to the spirits, hoping they would look kindly on him and provide their protection and guidance.

The next day, Yuri boarded a helicopter in the closest village of Novyi Port and travelled to Yar-Salé — the region’s administrative centre — to ask for help from a trusted friend. Yuri believed the discovery of the baby mammoth might actually provide a windfall to the Nenets community, but he also felt that his people and their homeland should receive some kind of credit for this discovery.

Within a few days, the baby mammoth was transferred to the city of Salekhard and stored at the natural history and ethnography museum. As a gesture of thanks and recognition to Yuri, Salekhard Museum officials named the baby mammoth after Yuri’s wife, Lyuba, which means “love” in Russian.

The first to examine Lyuba were French arctic explorer Bernard Buigues, Russian palaeontologist Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, and Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan in the U.S. Buigues, Tikhonov and Fisher conducted the initial review of X-rays and examined Lyuba’s exterior body. From these initial exams, they determined that both milk tusks were present and had completed their growth, suggesting a probable age of just a few months at the time of death.