Families can get an up-close view of the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center’s first exhibit before the center is even built.

A replica of a baby woolly mammoth skeleton discovered in Siberia in the late 1990s is on display at the Columbia Center mall in Kennewick, along with a box where people can enter a contest to name the mammoth.

The exhibit is at the south end of the mall near the Old Navy store through Dec. 31. The mammoth is about three feet long and 34 inches tall, and will be on display in a glass case.

The naming contest ends Oct. 15. The winner will be announced Oct. 31.

The original mammoth skeleton is at the North American Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point near Lehi, Utah.

Kimberly Camp, executive director for The Reach, said at a news conference Friday that she stumbled across the baby in December while searching for the Huntington mammoth skeleton, which is housed at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum.

Camp was on a quest to acquire a replica of the mammoth – which is a type of hairless mammoth that roamed the Mid-Columbia during the Pleistocene epoch – but couldn’t get to the museum because of snow.

A clerk at a dress shop suggested Camp visit the museum at Thanksgiving Point instead.

Camp said she toured the museum and knew immediately when she saw the baby that she’d have to bring it to The Reach – just in time to coincide with the opening of the animated film “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” which features a woolly mammoth couple about to have a baby.

Camp said the baby mammoth is just a sneak peek of what’s coming once the interpretive center opens its doors.

“We plan to have a full-size replica of an adult male Columbia mammoth skeleton in the Great Hall, along with our Ice Age Floods Theater, and exhibitions about the rich history of the Mid-Columbia,” she said.

The $40.5 million center will be a 61,000-square-foot facility at Columbia Point South in Richland, and is intended to tell the story of the Mid-Columbia’s history, geology, people, plants and animals, including Hanford’s role in winning the Cold War.

The center will offer tours of B Reactor – the nation’s first nuclear reactor – once it opens.