An autopsy of the mummy of a bison believed to be 9,300 years old discovered in 2011 by members of a Siberian tribe called the Yukagir reveals a likely cause of death — and could provide clues on its species’ demise.

The mummy is of an extinct species of bison called the steppe bison (Bison priscus). It was almost entirely intact, preserved deep in the frozen ground of Siberia. Other mummies of this species of bison have been discovered, but usually the carcasses are “partially eaten or destroyed because they’re lying in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years,” said Olga Potapova, who is the manager and collections curator at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in South Dakota and has studied the bison, as quoted by LiveScience.

The Yukagir bison, as it is called, earned a record for its completeness.

At least two aspects of this discovery have a special significance to scientists: the bison’s brain and the bison’s parasites.

The bison was studied at the Yakutian Academy of Sciences in Siberia. They discovered the likely age of the bison at time of death was four years, and believe the cause of death, due to the low level of fat around the bison’s abdomen, was starvation. The information scientists are able to glean from the tissue samples could allow them to pin down the reason for the animal’s extinction.

Though the internal organs of the animal were all nearly whole, they were shrunken, said the researchers. They were able to harvest tissue samples from every organ, said Potapova, but the animal’s DNA had thoroughly broken down.

The study of the brain tissue of the bison is underway currently. The researchers plan to use the information they gain to compare this bison to the modern bison.

The researchers will be able to use the parasites found in the bison to more accurately determine its age by means of their mitochondrial DNA.

The findings, first presented a the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, will be published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.