- A gold miner from the Yukon of Canada found the 57,000-year-old body of a female wolf cub in melting 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.
- Researchers believe the 7-week-old kid died after she fell.
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A 7-week-old gray wolf cub was in its lair in the Canadian Yukon 57,000 years ago, when it suddenly collapsed. The animal was killed instantly, but the wolf was frozen intact and buried under permafrost.
The cold meant that the body had barely fallen in subsequent millennia.
“It’s complete, with all the soft tissues intact and even the fur. This is a very rare discovery,” Julie Meachen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Des Moines, told Business Insider.
Meachen is the lead author of a study on wolves, published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
The case, which a miner found in the Klondike gold fields in 2016, is the most complete wolf mummy ever seen, Meachen added. Her team named the baby Zhùr, which means “wolf” in the local indigenous Hän language.
“Since Zhùr has been so intact, we can learn a lot from her short life,” Meachen said.
By examining the small body, researchers can gather clues about what the Earth was like during a much colder era and large areas of the world were covered in ice. I can also find out how ancient wolves lived and what they ate.
Every part of the wolf cubs was intact, except for the eyes
Meachen said handling the wolf’s body feels exhilarating.
“I was very ginger with her because I didn’t want to destroy anything,” she said.
Meachen and his colleagues took X-rays from Zhùr’s skeleton and analyzed samples of fur and tooth enamel. They found that the baby’s bones had not yet fully developed, which meant he was only seven weeks old at the time of his death. The body is a little over a leg long and weighs 1.5 kilograms.
A complete picture of the wolf cub mummy.
The Yukon Government
They knew the chick was female because the genitals were perfectly preserved.
The only parts Zhùr lacked were her eyes.
“The eyes are very soft and gelatinous, so they’re the first thing that disintegrates when an animal dies,” Meachen said. “The eyes are open to elements and bacteria and probably dehydrated quickly, which is why they appeared so crooked and seem completely absent.”
An X-ray view of a wolf cub found in the Yukon permafrost.
The Yukon Government
Analyzing traces of mineral in the enamel of the chick’s teeth, the researchers found that Zhùr was most likely 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 today’s wolves. They found that the mummified chick was related to the ancient gray wolves that once lived in Eurasia, as well as the modern gray wolves of North America. 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
The baby wolf, as found in the Yukon permafrost.
The Yukon Government
It’s unusual, Meachen said, to find mummies of animals intact in the Yukon.
“The animal must die in a permafrost location, where the ground is frozen all the time and must be buried very quickly, like any other fossilization process,” Meachen said in a press release. “If it lies on the frozen tundra for too long, it will decompose or be eaten.”
Analysis of Zhùr’s diet suggested that the animal did not starve. That’s why Meachen believes the chick died instantly when her lair collapsed unexpectedly.
“We were asked why he was the only wolf found in the lair and what happened to his mother or siblings,” she said. “It could have been a single cub. Or the other wolves weren’t in the pit during the crash. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.”
As the Earth warms, more animal mummies emerge from the permafrost
Findings like this are likely to become more common as Earth’s temperatures continue to rise.
As the planet warms, permafrost – the soil in the northern hemisphere that remains frozen all year round – begins to thaw. As it melts, ice age creatures such as Zhùr, who have been buried for tens of thousands of years, begin to be unearthed.
“This is probably the only silver lining of global warming,” Meachen said. “Scientists are excited to find these mummies and are terrified at the same time because we understand the implications for continuing climate change.”
A carcass of a bear from the ice age cave found on the large island of Lyakhovsky between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea in northern Russia.
Northeastern Federal University through AP
In a similar finding 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. Its species, Ursus spelaeus, lived during the last ice age and then disappeared 15,000 years ago.
The Lyakhovsky Islands, where the bear was found, are also full of woolly mammoth remains from the last ice age.
In nearby Yakutia, scientists discovered a 40,000-year-old cut wolf’s head with fur, teeth, brain and facial tissue on the banks of a river in 2019.
A cut wolf’s head from the ice age was found in Russia
Reuters
The Siberian permafrost also revealed two perfectly preserved, extinct lion cubs, as well as an old chicken horse that died in a mud pit 42,000 years ago. The hair, skin, tail and hooves of the foal were intact.