Scientists have extracted blood from a wooly mammoth carcass that they discovered frozen in the Arctic.  Dark, mud-thick blood flowed out of the mammoth's body when the team broke the ice coating its belly.

The team was flabbergasted. The mammoth is about 10,000 years old....and its muscle tissues are still red. The discovery is spurring hopes of cloning the woolly mammoth.

 Russian scientists made the discovery on the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean. Temperatures there often reach minus 10 degrees Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit).

"The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities below the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out," Semyon Grigoryev, the leader of the expedition from North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, said.

"We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free herself and died," Grigoryev said to the Siberian Times. "Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well."

It is the first time mammoth blood has been discovered; Grigoryev said it was "the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology" and "the most astonishing case in my entire life".

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat. The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice," he said.

When the female mammoth died, the researchers estimate that it was about 60. The Russian team will work with a South Korean team from the controversial Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in an effort to clone the creature.

"Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to -10ºC. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties," Grigoryev added. Cryoprotectant is a substance found in some modern amphibians and fish that protects against freezing temperatures.

Thus, even if the wooly mammoth is not cloned, the blood may have interesting applications for other research.