Woolly mammoth shoulder blade, tusk, among ice age fossils found by Yukon paleontology team

Grant Zazula is excited.

The Yukon government paleontologist just spent a week in the Klondike gold fields looking for — and finding — ice age fossils.

So far, he said, he and his team have found the shoulder blade of a woolly mammoth, a complete tusk, some leg bones, a steppe bison, some horses and some caribou.

"We think we found a bone of an ice age fox," he added.

But what has him even more excited is a block of frozen mud from the fields that is now in his freezer.

"You can see a leg bone with skin and hair coming out of it," he said. 

He thinks it's an ice-age rabbit but he'll find out in the fall when he has a chance to look at it more closely.

"So we have another amazing ice age mummified animal from the Klondike," he said.

Zazula's been looking for fossils in the Klondike gold fields for many years and has found an awful lot of them, he said.

They often find ice age mammals like woolly mammoths, steppe bison, ancient horses, lions, wolves and others, typically between 10,000 and 100,000 years old.

And yet, he continues to be amazed that there's always something new, something unexpected that he'll find.

"It's surprising to me," he said. "Every year we kind of think, ah, we're going to go to the Klondike, you know, we'll find the typical stuff and we'll find a few more of these and a few more of that, but every year we find something that's totally radical, something amazing."

Zazula found out about the mummified animal because the placer miner who found it decided to collect it, place it in a freezer and call him.

He said gold miners have been finding ice age fossils for 120 years in the Yukon and none of them would be discovered if it wasn't for their careful work.