Thigh bone's connected to the knee bone

I remember taking aptitude tests, the psych exam designed to reveal the sort of career one might follow down the path of eternal happiness.

Mine usually came back advising me to marry someone extremely wealthy and patient. 

I got the second part right, at least.  But nowhere did they tell me that there is a job out there known as "reindeer herder"!  That's the work for me. Plenty of time outside in the bracing cold air, and a chance to work with Mr Claus himself!  And even though my sheer size and stentorian tone would preclude the chance to be promoted to "elf," well, a boy can dream, right?

And here is what the reindeer herders in northern Siberia are up to: they found the skeleton of a woolly mammoth! The big beast's ligaments are still intact, and he bought the ranch about 10,000 years ago.

There they were, at scenic Pechevalavato Lake in the Yamalo-Nenets district of Russia, and they found his skull, ribs, and foot. They have a team digging around to try to find more olde time animals hanging around in the muck.

Dmitry Frolov, director of the Arctic Research Centre, tells the Siberian Times that it appears “the whole skeleton is there,” and that “Judging by the pictures this was a young mammoth, but we’ll have to wait for tests to give the exact age.”  This is borne out by the finding of K-Pop on his phone.

For years, this part of Siberia was frozen like BirdsEye frozen peas in permafrost, but thanks to global warming, things are in the defrost cycle, and so now people are up there finding enormous bones, soft tissue, and hastily discarded Smoothie cups.  Other animal parts that have come to the surface, as it were, include a 42,000-year-old foal well preserved, a 32,000-year-old wolf head, and an extinct cave lion cub.

Artist's depiction of recently found wolf.

According to Keith Richards, mammoths went extinct 10,000 years ago, but there are those who say some mammoth gangs hung around Alaska and the coast of Siberia for a while longer, because they couldn't find a place to plug in their chargers. That proves that these bones are at least 10,000 years old.

And when scientists took the tickets that they found in the mammoth's pockets to the cleaner, they were told "It'll be ready Friday."