Yakutia has a giant thermokarst basin in the Verkhoyansk ulus. This sinkhole reaches a kilometer in length, and its depth is about 100 meters.
Inside are the remains of ancient plants, bones and tusks of mammoths, frozen bison and horses, and the ice layer is twice as old as the ancient ice of Antarctica.
The age of the plants preserved in the basin reaches 120 thousand years. In 2009, local residents found the carcass of a bison calf and part of the carcass of an ancient horse in the basin. Batagay crater is a unique depository of fossil ivory.
No one knows how this circular depression, a kilometer in diameter, originated. A strange crack is heard at the bottom of the depression. It is emitted by the sheer walls of the crater, extending 100 meters into the permafrost. From time to time, thawed clods of earth are separated from them and fall down with a crash.
Men from a neighboring village immediately run up to these clods: if they are lucky, they may contain ivory. But more often they find fragments of the remains of woolly rhinoceros of the Pleistocene era or shreds of wool of ancient bison in the thawed earth.
And there will be more and more such finds in this paradise for researchers. Due to global warming, more frozen rock began to thaw in the Batagay crater than before, and now every summer the crater walls recede by twenty meters.
The discoveries of unique remains of horse and bison carcasses in the Verkhoyansk region of Yakutia became sensational finds. In July 2009, residents of the Verkhoyansk region E. Struchkov, G. and V. Lapparov, V. Tretyakov found an almost complete carcass of a young horse at the base of one of the earthen remnants of the Batagayka locality in the vicinity of the regional center Batagay.
The carcass did not have a head, left front leg and upper chest, the rest of the carcass with horny hooves on its hind legs remained in good condition. Radiocarbon analysis of soft tissues gave an absolute age of 4400 years. This age of the horse once again confirmed the opinion of the Yakut paleontologists that ancient horses did not die out along with mammoths 10 thousand years ago, but survived in the post-glacial Holocene time.
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The findings of Equus lenensis in the north of Yakutia and on the islands of the Novosibirsk archipelago with geological ages of 4600, 3000, 2300 and 2200 years were an irrefutable confirmation of this discovery, which was initially denied by most paleontologists. This data adds value to research
In the same year, in September, E. Podchkov found a whole bison carcass not far from the horse burial. Bison in the late Pleistocene were widespread in Eurasia and North America and were the most numerous group of artiodactyls. The bison cubs found in the region are the only cubs of this species in the world today and the second in the world complete carcass of a primitive bison, which is extremely important scientifically for studying the ontogeny of this representative of the mammoth fauna.
The individual age of the calf is about 2 months. The individual characteristics of a baby bison of this age are not yet known to science. The absolute age of the Batagai bison radiocarbon analysis showed 8800 years. Comprehensive studies of these finds undoubtedly provided a lot of important information about the ancient inhabitants of Yakutia.