Ice age baby mammoth goes on display in Hong Kong-免費學英文－金學堂英語的部落格

連接到影片http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2012/04/12/inocencio-hkong-mammoths-mall.cnn

Hong Kong (CNN) -- From the ice age to the modern age, a
42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth debuted on the world stage in Hong Kong.

Scientists say Lyuba, which means
"love" in Russian, died after 32 days of life, drowning in river mud in
present-day Siberia.

And for more than 40 millennia,
she laid there encased in her dark, frigid grave.

But Thursday the two-foot tall
baby mammoth stood in the hot spotlight at Hong Kong's high-end International
Finance Center Mall -- across from Chanel and flanked by an Apple store and a
Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop.

Karim Azar, general manager of
IFC Mall, explained how ice age relics pair up with modern-day retail.

"We try to be a little bit more
than a shopping mall. We want to try and be a cultural center. We're always
looking for events that will attract a more cultural kind of angle."

Azar declined to say exactly how
much money the mall paid to get Lyuba from her home at Russia's Shemanovsky
Museum but he did hint it was in the realm of several million Hong Kong dollars
-- 7.8 million Hong Kong dollars equals about $1 million in U.S. currency.

"We don't do it for the monetary
gain," Azar said. "We're doing it more for the cultural connection for the Hong
Kong people and to get something interesting for the shopping mall."

He says the "headaches" and "red
tape" -- including a Hong Kong promise to Russia to return Lyuba -- were worth
it for the archaeological significance.

Bernard Buigues, the French
explorer who announced Lyuba's discovery in 2007, divulged that Lyuba is insured
for U.S. $1.5 million. But the director of the Mammuthus Project added she is
priceless.

"When you have access to such a
specimen you think it's not possible. You have to pinch yourself and think you
are dreaming," he said.

Buigues goes on to say how
excited he was to see Lyuba for the first time, and how fortunate a reindeer
herder found the mammoth in 2007. The region's extreme cold and the lack of
oxygen from Lyuba's thick mud grave had helped to keep her nearly 100%
intact.

Aside from missing a few
toenails, Lyuba still sports a tuft of hair. Her skin is a near life-like grey.
Even her last meal was preserved. That included her mother's milk and bits of
her mother's feces -- an aid for digestion.

The baby mammoth is not alone on
her field trip to Asia. Also on loan from Russia's Shemanovsky Museum is a
three-story, two-ton replica of a woolly mammoth skeleton. A trio of real skulls
from other extinct ice age animals round out Lyuba's coterie -- a woolly rhino
with a long single horn, a steppe bison and an open-mouthed cave lion baring its
sharp predator's teeth.

But Lyuba is the star of this
show. To the thousands of expected visitors, she may prove that being 42,000
years old never looked so good.

The exhibit "I Love Lyuba:
Baby Mammoth of the Ice Age" extends to May 10, 2012 at Hong Kong's
International Finance Center Mall