Russian researchers first dug up the dog’s preserved, dead body – which could have been a dog or a wolf – in 2011 from a site in Tumat, Siberia.
Inside the stomach of a 14,000-year-old puppy sat a hairy piece of tissue. At first, scientists assumed that the fragment belonged to a cave lion, because of its fine yellow fur. But tests by experts at Stockholm’s Natural History Museum told a different story.
“When they got the DNA back, it didn’t look like a caveat,” Love Dalen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Center for Palaeogenetics, a joint venture between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, told CNN.
“We have a reference database and mitochondrial DNA of all mammals, so we checked the sequence data against that and the results that came back – it was an almost perfect match for woolly rhinoceros,” Dalen said.
“It’s completely unusual. I’m not aware of a frozen carnival of the Ice Age where they found pieces of tissue inside,” he said.
After radiocarbon dating of the sample, experts determined that the rhino skin was about 14,400 years old.
“This puppy, we already know, is dated to about 14,000 years ago. We also know that the woolly rhinoceros became extinct 14,000 years ago. So potentially this puppy ate one of the last remaining woolly rhinos,” he said.
Scientists do not know how the puppy had a piece of rhino in its stomach.
The researchers also found it interesting that the puppy died shortly after eating the rhino.
“This puppy must have died shortly after eating the rhino because it is not very deep,” Dalen told CNN.
“We do not know if it was a wolf, but if it was a wolf cub, maybe it was about a baby rhino that was dead when the (adult) wolf ate the baby rhino,” he speculated. “Maybe when she ate it, the mother rhino had her revenge.”
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