500-year-old chamois mummy revealed on glacier
The chamois mummy is being safely stored in a freezer – 20 degrees Celsius outside Innsbruck, in the Ferdinandeum research center, Tyrolean museum.
The researchers will scan the animal and examine the inside of the intestine.
Through studying it along with another 400-year-old chamois mummy found in 2020, they hope to learn more about the species as well as why the two animals roamed the glacier and died there.
In addition, this is also an opportunity to learn more about the natural mummification process.
The antelope still had horns, skin and feathers exposed when large amounts of ice melted on the Gepatschferner Glacier in the Alps this summer.
Andrea Fischer, a glaciologist at the Interdisciplinary Mountain Research Institute in Innsbruck, on Aug. 4 used a chainsaw to remove the mummy of a chamois from a glacier in the Alps.
Fischer and his colleagues identified it as a young female chamois, no more than 0.6 m tall.
