Baby mammoth’s story coming to Field Museum:

Paleontological museum exhibits displaying remains of long-extinct creatures don’t usually carry much of an emotional wallop, but a new temporary wooly mammoth and mastodon exhibit at the Field Museum has at its core a pretty sad story.

The exhibit, which opens Friday, features one of the more celebrated paleontological specimens to have been discovered in recent years, the almost perfectly intact remains of a baby wooly mammoth that fell into a frigid Siberian mud hole and suffocated 42,000 years ago.

She was named Lyuba, the Russian word for “love”, by the reindeer herders who found her carcass washed out of the frozen muck along a Siberian river three years ago.

The Field Museum, showing her off in a media preview Tuesday, has brought Lyuba’s remains to the U.S. for the first time from the Russian museum where she normally resides