Its tail is lopsided. Close up, it looks suspiciously like a small, and unremarkable, Asian elephant.

But scientists were yesterday hailing the sensational discovery of a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth, which died around 10,000 years ago and was found in the frozen tundra of northern Russia. Experts said the six-month-old female calf was a rare complete specimen. The animal's trunk and eyes are intact. It even has fur.

A reindeer herder, Yuri Khudi, stumbled across the carcass in May near the Yuribei river in Russia's Yamal-Nenents autonomous district, in a virtually inaccessible part of north-western Siberia.

Extinct woolly mammoths - and giant tusks - have turned up in Siberia for centuries. But it is unusual for a complete example to be recovered. The last major find was in 1997 when a family in the neighbouring Taymyr Peninsula came across a tusk attached to what turned out to be a 20,380-year-old mammoth carcass.

The latest 130cm tall, 50kg Siberian specimen appears to have died just as the species was heading for extinction during the last ice age. It is being sent to Japan for further tests.