PHOTOS: 30,000-year-old mammoth calf found frozen in Canada

A frozen, healthy woolly mammoth calf was found in the permafrost of northwestern Canada last week. It is the first specimen found in North America.

Experts estimate that the mummified mammoth, which dates back to the Ice Age, is more than 30,000 years old. It was found Tuesday, June 21, in the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin traditional territory by miners working in the Klondike goldfields, according to a Yukon government press release.

"The Yukon has a world-renowned fossil record of ice age animals, but mummified remains with skin and hair are rarely unearthed," reads the text, adding that Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin elders named the mammoth calf Nun cho ga, meaning "big baby animal" in the Hän language.

The Yukon government also compared the significance of this find to the 2007 discovery of a baby mammoth that was also buried in the permafrost of Siberia, Russia.

"A quick examination of the woolly mammoth suggests that it is female and about the same size as the 42,000-year-old infant woolly mammoth mummy 'Lyuba' discovered in Siberia in 2007," it continues.

In addition, the government claims that the discovery of Nun cho ga marks the first nearly complete and best-preserved mummified woolly mammoth found in North America, comparing its good condition to that of a partial mammoth calf, named Effie, found in 1948 in a gold mine in interior Alaska. 

"As an ice age paleontologist, it has been one of my lifelong dreams to come face-to-face with a real woolly mammoth. That dream came true today," Yukon paleontologist Grant Zazula said in the release. "Nun cho ga is beautiful and one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world."