kedreeva:An incredibly well-preserved, 57,000 year old wolf pup specimen has been found in the Yukon
kedreeva:An incredibly well-preserved, 57,000 year old wolf pup specimen has been found in the Yukon permafrost!Her name, Zhùr, means “wolf” in the Hän language of the local Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in people, and she was just 7 weeks old when she died.From the article:“She is the most complete wolf specimen ever found from the ice age,” said lead author Julie Meachen, an associate professor of Anatomy at Des Moines University in Iowa. “All her soft tissue, her hair, her skin, even her little nose is still there. She’s just complete. And that is really rare.”“When I looked at the X-rays and could see her intestines, that gave me a little thrill,” Meachen said. “I’d never seen 57,000-year-old intestines before.” Although in the end, bone analysis, not her stomach contents, allowed the team to reconstruct Zhùr’s diet.During her short life, Zhùr fed on mostly aquatic food, such as Chinook salmon that currently spawn in the Klondike River, they found. This isn’t uncommon in modern wolves, which have been shown to seasonally switch to aquatic diets in Alaska. However, scientists had assumed that Yukon wolves would have mainly eaten bison or musk oxen during the ice age.The Beringia Center near Whitehorse has a storage space with freezers and if you’re a visiting archaeologist and they give you a tour they’ll just casually pull out permafrost-mummified pieces of extinct animals. Things like this explain why I, a person who hates cold, keep going to work in Alaska. Even after years the level of preservation in the permafrost sometimes seems like magic. -- source link