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THE BIG STORY

In 1979, gold miners near Fairbanks, Alaska, were melting frozen muck with a hydraulic mining hose when part of an animal began to show. Walter and Ruth Roman and their sons had found the body of an ancient bison.

It was a steppe bison (Bison priscus), preserved in the permafrost since the Ice Age. Marks on its hide indicate it was killed by an Ice Age American lion, and a fragment of a lion's tooth was later found lodged in its thick skin. The carcass probably froze soon after, and over time it became part of the permafrost.

University of Alaska paleontologist Dale Guthrie dug it out, with help from his wife, Mary Lee, and his son, Owen. When a mineral on its skin called vivianite met the air, it turned a brilliant blue. That earned the bison its nickname, Blue Babe, after Paul Bunyan's giant blue ox.

A taxidermist from Finland then came to prepare Blue Babe for display. In April 1984, Guthrie held a bison stew dinner to celebrate the work.

A small part of the mummy's neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables.

"The taste was delicious, and none of us suffered any ill effects from the meal," Guthrie wrote. His wife, Mary Lee, later said it was worse than beef jerky.

Its exact age is still being worked out. It was first dated to about 36,000 years ago in the 1980s, and newer estimates go back 50,000 years or more.

Blue Babe is the only known display in the world of an Ice Age bison recovered from permafrost. It is still on show at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, minus a small piece of its neck.

It lasted tens of thousands of years in the frozen ground. A small piece of it did not survive one dinner.

QUICK STORY · BY READER REQUEST

By reader request: on Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, many villagers came to believe that leopards belonged to witches, who sent them out to attack children and livestock.

The Zanzibar leopard (Panthera pardus adersi) lived on Unguja and nowhere else. In the 20th century, a growing population and spreading farms took its habitat and prey, and it came into more and more conflict with people.

After the 1964 revolution, the fear became an island-wide campaign, backed by the government, to kill leopards and find the witches said to keep them. It lasted into the early 1970s, and the hunting went on after it. By the 1990s, the leopard was on the brink of extinction.

In 1997, two researchers searched for it with camera traps, played recorded leopard calls and hunted for tracks. They found no sign of leopards.

Most zoologists now presume it is extinct. But many islanders believe the leopard keepers are still out there, and sightings are still reported.

The leopards are almost certainly gone. The fear of them isn't.

QUICK STORY

In the summer of 1908, fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg took his three sons into eastern Wyoming. He had agreed that a good specimen would go to the British Museum of Natural History in London, and he was hunting a Triceratops skull. For weeks, they found nothing.

Sternberg finally found his skull. Then his sons George and Levi spotted bones sticking out of a sandstone cliff. While their father was away taking the skull to the town of Lusk, the brothers ran nearly out of food and spent the last day living on boiled potatoes. They still cut away a mass of sandstone 3.7 meters (12 feet) wide and 4.6 meters (15 feet) deep.

Under it lay a duck-billed dinosaur on its back, with the impressions of its skin wrapped around the bones. Sternberg, a collector for 40 years, called it "the crowning specimen of my life work."

The American Museum of Natural History in New York bought it, and the museum's Henry Fairfield Osborn suggested calling it a "dinosaur mummy." It turned out to be an Edmontosaurus (Edmontosaurus annectens).

Osborn had written to Sternberg that his own museum's crews had searched those beds for four years without success.

THIS WEEK IN FOSSILS

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Did You Know? When scientists named a giant fossil sperm whale from Peru in 2010, they called it Leviathan, then learned the name was already taken. Albert Koch had used Leviathan in 1841 for what turned out to be a mastodon, so the whale was renamed Livyatan.

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