There’s only one fossil that ever made me cry. Lyuba, a one month old woolly mammoth, made me a little misty-eyed when I visited her body at New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center in October of 2010. She was beautiful, intact down to hairs in her little floppy ears, but the entire reason her body retained its composure was because Lyuba suffered a tragic death. Somehow she suffocated in Ice Age mud, coming to rest in the chilled mire. Even though I couldn’t see it, there was still sediment in her throat and lungs when I visited her corpse.

What I didn’t know was that Lyuba wasn’t unique. Not long after Lyuba’s discovery in 2007, paleontologists announced the discovery of a second