This Ice Age wolf puppy doesn’t look like a terrifying predator, with its tiny puppy teeth and soft little ears. According to its DNA, however, the mummified puppy, named Zummer, came from a population that is the ancestor of all modern wolves. Canada’s permafrost froze-dried about 57,000 years after its death.
“It’s the perfect wolf mummy ever found. It’s basically 100 percent intact – all that’s missing is its eyes, “said Julie Michen, a paleontologist at the University of Des Moines.
Puppy surprise
In July 2016, Neil Lovelace, a miner at Favran Enterprise, was exploring for gold in the gold field in Alaska. It was filling up on frozen mud on the shores of Last Chance Creek. It is a process called “hydraulic thawing”, which was meant to melt and soften frozen permafrost so that miners could search for gold in striped deposits, called a placer mining. But Loveless found something unfamiliar and even more interesting than Clondike Gold: a stable, mummified wolf puppy.
“We are thankful [Loveless] The toxins were melted from the permafrost, kept safe in the freezer, and then reported to Yukon Paleontology for discovery, for his keen eye, wrote in a recent paper in the Journal of Current Biology. Studying Pleistocene wildlife in the Yukon means working with gold mining companies, whose workers may be the first to discover something like Zahur. Scientists like Michen also work closely with people who, for thousands of years, have made the region their home, like the region Ndek Hwachin First Nation.
The group members gave the puppy its name, which means “wolf” in Hindi. Venom is a culturally significant discovery for Trendek Hwachin, but he was also interested in how much a stable puppy could teach us about Pleistocene wolves. Mom agreed to exhibit at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center in First Nation Whitehorse, where she has been cleaned, preserved and studied.
“We are grateful for the partnership with Trendek Hwachin in our collaborative role in the protection and preservation of heritage resources in Klondike,” Michen and colleagues wrote.
Taking small samples of some of the venom’s most vigorously preserved hair follicles, Michen and his colleagues called the radiocarbon a stable puppy and studied the chemical isotopes in her body, indicating what she was eating and the environment in which she lived. They also indexed its mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material passed directly from mother to offspring.
Ancestors of modern wolves
Poison may have lived about 57,000 years ago, but it took three different dating methods to determine.
Radiocarbon dating could only tell Michen and his colleagues that the mummy is more than 50,000 years old. Based on the rate at which the wolf’s DNA collects mutations over time, the puppy’s genome suggested that it lived between 75,000 and 56,000 years ago. And the oxygen isotopes in his body indicate that he lives during the relatively warm period of marine isotope stage 3, while the warmer conditions lead to a smaller ratio of isotope oxygen-18 in the coral reefs and toxins in the body. MIS3 lasted from 57,000 to 29,000 years ago.
All those possible dates overlapped at one time: 57,000 to 56,000 years ago. At that time, the sea level was much lower than it is today, and an area of dry land called Beringia connected Siberia and Canada. Animals moved freely back and forth between continents, which is why the Pleistocene wolves found in Eurasia and North America are all so closely related. Zur’s mitochondrial DNA matches closely with a common ancestor in a group of animals closely related to a common ancestor from 86,000 to 67,500,000 years ago.
Poison and its clade are the ancestors of every wolf in the world (except the wavy Himalayan wolves, which have apparently been doing their work for hundreds of thousands of years, according to a study conducted in early 2020).
But, because mitochondrial DNA is passed directly from mother to puppy, Michen and his colleagues may say that Zur was not the direct ancestor of the wolves that roam in Klondike today. In the last, 000,000,000 years or so, the Klondike wolf population died or left the area, and was replaced by another group of wolves, which was closely related to the Zur. At the moment, it’s not enough data to say that newcomers kicked, kicked out, or just sucked Zur’s relatives, but couldn’t find a puppy’s DNA clue to an interesting story.
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The gold miner found the mummified puppy and kept it in the freezer until paleontologists collected it.
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The guards cleaned the mummified puppy and carefully cleaned its fur.
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The remains of the puppy have dried up but mostly intact thanks to being buried in permafrost.
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X-rays showed how fully developed the puppy’s bones were, which paleontologists estimated his age.
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Puppies’ teeth are mostly intact, with details of their lips and teeth.
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Permafrost mummies are very fragile, and you shouldn’t do a snoot boop.
Wolves also eat fish
If the poison can’t tell Machen and his colleagues exactly what happened to the entire population of Klondike wolves, he can tell at least a little part of his story. Depending on how her bones developed, she was about 7 weeks old when the puppy died. Modern wolves in the area usually give birth in early summer, meaning Zur may have died in July or early August, at the same time as Loveless washed her with permafrost 57,000 years later.
By then, the Tsar’s mother had weaned her cubs and started bringing them real food. Modern wolf puppies start eating solid food at about 5 or 6 weeks of age. In the case of Zuhr, according to the amount of isotope nitrogen-15 in his body, it appears to contain many fish. Nitrogen isotopes provide clues about the distance to the animal’s food chain and how much of its food came from land or water.
Given all the fish, the puppy’s breath would have been outrageous. “Usually, when you think of wolves in the ice age, you think of them eating bison or musk oxen or other large animals on the ground.” “One of the things that surprised us was that it ate aquatic resources, especially salmon.”
Modern wolves are readily available on fish in the interior of Alaska, in asons tuo when they are readily available. And the Dan Klondike of Zuhr was not far from the river, where today Chinook Salmon is. The fish swim across the Yukon River on Klondike, where they would have been a perfect slap in the face for a mother wolf to feed her cubs.
How to freeze-dry the Ice Age hunter
Naturally things didn’t end well for Poison, or we wouldn’t have the ridiculous Honorable Canned Ice Mummy taught today. His burial may contain a few clues about his untimely demise and about his restless good defense during the millennium that followed. She just died in the right conditions and was soon buried – a rare compound. “Animals have to die in permafrost places, where the soil is always frozen, and like any other fossil process they are buried very quickly,” Michene said.
Animals that are killed by predators do not tend to make surviving ice mummies, and even animals that die from illness or infection are not buried enough to quickly freeze and mummify. And isotopic analysis suggests that the puppy was well-nourished, so whatever happened, it was probably not sick and not starving.
Michen and his comrades think that Zur’s Dan collapsed, she was immediately killed and the remains were buried in the cold ground. “We feel a little better knowing that the poor little girl won’t be in trouble for too long,” Mitchell said.
There is another question that Poison will never be able to answer, though: why was she in the room at all? Wolf mothers usually have four to six puppies at a time, but only poison was buried along Last Chance Creek; The sign of his mother or the trash doesn’t turn “It could be that she was an only cub, or the other wolves weren’t in Albert during the fall,” Michene said. “Unfortunately, we’ll never know.”
Caution tail
Permafrost mummies of large mammals, such as mammoths, bears and even wolves, are rarely seen by paleontologists. But small ones, such as ground squirrels and ferrets, come more often to places like Siberia and the Yukon. Mischen and his colleagues speculate that animals living in tonsils or cages, including wolf cubs, may have better difficulty being preserved in permafrost, especially if they die in cave-ins.
However, finding large permafrost mummies is also common. A cave bear emerged from the Siberian permafrost earlier this year, and is one of several recent discoveries. “One of the small consequences of climate change is that we will find more mummies as the permafrost melts.” “It’s a great way for science to recreate that time, but it shows us how hot our planet really is.”
Current Biology, 2020 DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2020.11.011 (About DOI).
