Five men lifted Lyuba from her storage box. Hands sheathed in white gloves, they gingerly raised the 42,000-year-old remains of the woolly mammoth calf at a storage facility in Chai Wan yesterday.
'She feels hard, not soft at all,' said Thomas Yuen, the managing director of Michelle Art Services, who is more used to handling works of art than mummified corpses.
Lyuba's grey hide is wrinkled and bare, stripped of the shaggy fur that characterised the extinct species. The tip of her trunk is forever curled.
This is how she lay for millennia, pickled in silt and water and frozen solid under the permafrost, deep in the Siberian Arctic. Then, in 2007, a reindeer herder from the Nenet indigenous people found her - the best-preserved baby woolly mammoth specimen ever found.
She now finds herself in Hong Kong and, from tomorrow, in IFC Mall in Central.
'We're trying to bring art and culture to the people,' said Peter Cook, director at the Globecreative marketing firm. The company worked with the International Finance Centre to stage the exhibition 'I love Lyuba: Baby Mammoth of the Ice Age'. The exhibition runs from tomorrow to May 10 on IFC's podium level.
