Blue Babe: Would You Eat 36,000-year-old Bison Meat?

The Alaskan Gold Rush, which began around the end of the 19th century, brought many miners and prospectors to this American state. During their mining operations, many miners have come across the frozen mummies of ancient animals. Blue Babe is the name given to a mummified Alaskan steppe bison that was discovered in 1979. One of the most remarkable features of Blue Babe is that it was found to be almost completely intact, which is quite unusual for the remains of animals which lived during Blue Babe’s time.

Scientific analyses of the carcass and the frozen soil that entombed Blue Babe have yielded a large amount of valuable data, which allowed researchers to piece together the story of the bison, in particular the last days of its life.

Studying Blue Babe. (University of Alaska)

Finding and Excavating Blue Babe

Ancient remains were often incomplete, and would be discarded by the miners, who were more interested in gold than in frozen animal remains. In 1979, a family of gold miners, Walter and Ruth Roman, and their sons, were mining near Fairbanks. Water from a hydraulic mining hose they were using melted the frozen soil Blue Babe was embedded in, thus exposing the part of the bison’s frozen remains. The miners named their find Blue Babe, in reference to the metallic blue sheen of the creature’s hide, which reminded them of Babe the Blue Ox from the American folklore of Paul Bunyan.