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If this year’s Yukon gold-mining season goes as planned, the territory’s hundred or so gold-mining operations will sift an estimated 50,000 ounces of nuggets and gold dust out of the Klondike ground.

In the process, the ancient soil is also expected to turn up more than 2,000 pieces of ice age moose, bison, beavers, mammoth and camels. Some of them so well-preserved in the frozen ground, in fact, that there is still rotting flesh attached.

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“Bone parts, bone fragments, mammoth tusks, bison horns, bison skulls; you name it, we usually find it,” said a representative with Schmidt Mining, one of the territory’s largest gold operators.

Earlier this month, a Schmidt Mining operation at Canyon Creek turned up the intact skull of an ice age horse that went extinct more than 12,000 years ago — about the time human civilization was forming in Mesopotamia.

Past finds have included an entire mammoth skull, a mummified horse still bearing the bite marks of an ancient wolf, an entire frozen ferret from 40,000 years ago and a 700,000-year-old horse bone that yielded the world’s oldest sequenced genome.