Oldest liquid blood

Liquid blood was extracted from a young male Lenskaya horse (a now extinct species) unearthed from the permafrost of the Batagai depression in Yakutia (Sakha Republic), Russia, in June 2018. The extremely well-preserved animal has been radiocarbon-dated to 41,000–42,000 years old. The autopsy was carried out on 28 February 2019 by scientists from the North-Eastern Federal University (Russia) and Sooam Biotech Research Foundation (South Korea), under the direction of Professor Hwang Woo-suk and Dr Semyon Grigoriev, director of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, Russia.

It’s estimated that the foal was only around two weeks old when it died.

The scientists were also able to extract urine from the horse’s bladder – also the oldest liquid urine on record.

The same group of researchers also found the oldest liquid blood prior to this, which was extracted from a preserved mammoth dated to approximately 32,200 years old. Nicknamed "Buttercup", the mammoth was found on Maly Lyakhovsky Island in northern Siberia, Russia, in 2013.

The scientists are now looking to extract live cells from the blood sample, from which the extinct species of horse could potentially be cloned.