Fossilized remains of a woolly mammoth.

An 11year old boy in Russia made quite the discovery. He came across a well preserved fossil of an adult woolly mammoth. From BBC News:

The remains were discovered at the end of August in Sopochnaya Karga, 3,500km (2,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

A team of experts from St Petersburg then spent five days in September extracting the body from frozen mud.

The mammoth is estimated to have been around 16 years old when it died; it stood 2m tall and weighed 500kg.

It has been named Zhenya, after Zhenya Salinder, the 11-year-old who found the carcass while walking his dogs in the area.

Alexei Tikhonov, from the St Petersburg Zoology Institute, who led the team excavating the mammoth, said this specimen could either have been killed by Ice Age humans, or by a rival mammoth.

He added that it was well preserved for an adult specimen.

His colleague Sergei Gorbunov, from the International Mammoth Committee, which works to recover and safeguard such remains, said: “We had to use both traditional instruments such as axes, picks, shovels as well as such devices as this “steamer” which allowed us to thaw a thin layer of permafrost.

“Then we cleaned it off, and then we melted more of it. It took us a week to complete this task.”