A baby woolly mammoth which spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost, has provided scientists with clues about how the species survived during the Ice Age.

"Lyuba" was sucked to her death in a muddy river bed. She was so well preserved that traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly when she was discovered three years ago by nomadic reindeer herders.

Lyuba is to be the star of a mammoths-and-mastodons exhibition at Chicago's Field Museum, due to open in March.

Lyuba appeared to be in perfect health when she died and researchers found sediment and mud in her mouth, trunk and throat which indicates that she suffocated while struggling to free herself from a mud hole or slurry.

She is intact enough to yield DNA, but "no one is on the threshold of cloning at this point", said Prof Fisher.

When the exhibition closes in Septmber 2010 Lubya will embark on a 10-city tour whose final stop is scheduled for London's Natural History Museum in 2014.