Photos show ancient and intact wolf cub mummy found in Yukon permafrost

• A gold miner in the Yukon of Canada found the body of a 57,000-year-old baby wolf in melted permafrost.
• According to a new study, it is the most complete wolf mummy ever found.
• The wolf’s fur, teeth, and soft tissues are intact, only the eyes are missing.
• Investigators believe the 7-week-old cub died after its den collapsed.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

A 7-week-old gray wolf cub was in its den in the Canadian Yukon 57,000 years ago when it suddenly collapsed. The animal died instantly, but the wolf was frozen intact and buried under permafrost.

The cold meant that the body barely rotted for the next few millennia.

“It’s complete, with all of its soft tissue intact and even its fur. This is a very rare find,” Julie Meachen, a professor of anatomy at Des Moines University, told Business Insider.

Meachen is the lead author of a study on the wolf, published Monday in the journal Current Biology.

The corpse, which a miner found in the Klondike gold fields in 2016, is the most complete wolf mummy ever seen, Meachen added. His team named the cub Zhùr, which means “wolf” in the local indigenous language Hän.

“Since Zhùr was so intact, we can learn a lot from her short life,” Meachen said.

By examining the tiny body, researchers can gain clues about what Earth looked like during a time when it was much colder and wide swaths of the world were covered in ice. They can also find out how ancient wolves lived and what they ate.

Every part of the wolf cub was intact except for the eyes.

Meachen said manipulating the wolf’s body felt exhilarating.

“I was very redheaded with her because I didn’t want to damage anything,” she said.

Meachen and his colleagues took X-rays of Zhùr’s skeleton and analyzed samples of his coat and tooth enamel. They found that the puppy’s bones had not yet fully developed, so they determined that he was only seven weeks old at the time of death. The body is just over a foot long and weighs 1.5 pounds.

They knew that the cub was female, since the genitals were perfectly preserved.

The only parts Zhùr was missing were his eyes.

“The eyes are very soft and gelatinous, so they are the first thing to disintegrate when an animal dies,” Meachen said. “The eyes are open to the elements and bacteria, and they probably dried out quickly, which is why they looked so wilted and seem to be completely absent.”

By analyzing traces of minerals in the enamel of the pup’s teeth, the researchers found that Zhùr had likely been recently weaned and that the wolf family’s diet consisted of fish, possibly salmon, from the nearby Klondike River.

The team also compared Zhùr’s DNA to that of wolves today. They discovered that the mummified cub was related to ancient gray wolves that once lived in Eurasia, as well as modern North American gray wolves. The genetic similarities suggest that Zhùr’s ancestors migrated between the two continents using the Bering Land Bridge.

The nature of Zhùr’s death kept the wolf preserved

It is unusual, Meachen said, to find intact animal mummies in the Yukon.

“The animal has to die in a place of permafrost, where the ground is frozen all the time, and they have to be buried very quickly, like any other fossilization process,” Meachen said in a press release. “If it stays too long in the frozen tundra, it will decompose or be eaten.”

Analysis of Zhùr’s diet suggested that the animal did not starve. That is why Meachen believes that the cub died instantly when his den unexpectedly collapsed.

“They have asked us why she was the only wolf found in the den and what happened to her mother or her brothers,” he said. “It could be that she was a unique cub. Or the other wolves weren’t in the den during the collapse. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.”

As Earth warms, more animal mummies emerge from permafrost

Discoveries like this are likely to become more common as Earth’s temperatures continue to rise.

As the planet warms, permafrost, soil in the Northern Hemisphere that remains frozen all year round, begins to thaw. As it melts, ice age creatures like Zhùr that were buried for tens of thousands of years are beginning to be unearthed.

“That is probably the only positive side of global warming,” Meachen said. “Scientists are delighted to find these mummies and at the same time horrified that we understand what the implications are for continuing climate change.”

In a similar find in September, Siberian researchers announced that they had found a perfectly preserved adult cave bear, with its nose, teeth and internal organs still intact. Scientists believe that the bear died 22,000 to 39,500 years ago. His species, Ursus spelaeus, lived during the last Ice Age and then became extinct 15,000 years ago.

The Lyakhovsky Islands, where the bear was found, are also littered with the remains of woolly mammoths from the last ice age.

In nearby Yakutia, scientists discovered a 40,000-year-old severed wolf head, with hair, teeth, brain, and facial tissue on the banks of a river in 2019.

Siberian permafrost has also revealed two extinct and perfectly preserved cave lion cubs, as well as an ancient baby horse that died in a mud pit 42,000 years ago. The foal’s fur, fur, tail and hooves were intact.