A perfectly preserved corpse of a lion cub was found inside a cave in Siberia. The lion cub was a female and died almost 28,000-years-ago, according to experts. The cub is ‘arguably the best-preserved Ice-age animal ever found’ as per scientists.

According to the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden, the extinct big cat named Sparta is so well protected against deterioration that traces of its mother’s milk may be identifiable in its stomach.

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“The find itself is unique. Maybe, we hope, some disintegrated parts of the mother’s milk [remain intact] because if we have that, we can understand what its mother’s diet was,” said Valery Plotnikov, one of the authors of the study.

The scientists revealed that the fur, skeleton and internal organs of the creature are all still present.

The find, who is said to be a female cub, was just one or two months old at the time of its death. The corpse was found close to the Semyuelyakh River in Russia’s Yakutia region in 2018 by two mammoth tusk collectors.

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However, the findings of the study on the find were recently published in the Quaternary journal. The research was conducted by scientists from France, Japan, Russia, and Sweden.

Another cub named Boris was discovered from the same location just last year, reports suggest. The other find was made 15 meters away from Sparta.

Experts earlier suspected that both the cubs were from the same litter and age. However, radiocarbon dating technology has now shown they actually lived millennia apart. Boris is thought to have pre-dated Sparta by about 15,000 years.

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Plotnikov suggested that the bodies of the two animals were found in a clean condition which means no apparent damage was inflicted by predators or hunters on them. This might mean that they have died in their own dens under a snowfall or earth fall.