CHICAGO (AFP) – Sucked to her death in a muddy river bed, a baby woolly mammoth spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost where her body was so perfectly preserved traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly.

Three years after her discovery by nomadic reindeer herders, Lyuba will head to Chicago as the star of a mammoths and mastodons exhibit at the world-famous Field Museum.

The exhibition, announced at mid-week, opens March 5 and will run through September 6. The Field Museum is the first US museum to display the prehistoric specimen.