Many modern wolves in the interior of Alaska have similar diets, noshing on fish more often than big game. The geochemical signatures in her teeth indicate that she subsisted on meals from rivers and streams, perhaps fish like the Chinook salmon that still spawn in the rivers near where she was found. Only about seven weeks old when she died, the pup had just passed weaning age, when she would have begun eating more solid foods. Zhur’s body also tells us about her life. Without Zhur’s genes, this extirpation and replacement would have been invisible to scientists.
“Ancient DNA repeatedly demonstrates how much more complex evolutionary histories and palaeoecology are than we might otherwise derive from studies of bones and fossils,” Murchie says. “To have such extraordinary preservation of a carnivore is a unique situation to look into Ice Age ecosystems from a predator’s point of view,” says McMaster University palaeogeneticist Tyler Murchie, who was not involved in the study. These were the times of mastodons, camels, giant beavers, and, as Zhur documents, grey wolves. Zhur lived during an interglacial, when the vast Arctic glaciers temporarily receded, and woodlands overtook the chillier grasslands. The research offers a glimpse at a period of respite between icy spans of Earth’s history. “She tells us a lot,” Meachen says, from her age at death-seven weeks-to what she was eating. But there’s more to Zhur than what can be seen with the naked eye. “The preservation looks amazing,” says University of Copenhagen palaeontologist Ross Barnett, who was not involved with the study. Much of Zhur has remained intact after tens of thousands of years, from the fur of her coat to the delicate papillae on her tongue. “In Siberia, preservation like this is fairly common because of the way the permafrost preserves things there, which is way less common in the Yukon, Alaska, and other parts of North America,” says Des Moines University palaeontologist Julie Meachen, who is the lead author of a study describing Zhur published today in the journal Current Biology. However, finding such an intact wolf in the Yukon is unprecedented. The local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people named the 57,000-year-old pup Zhur, meaning “wolf” in the language of their community.Įxceptional mammals have been recovered from the Siberian tundra that also date back to the Pleistocene epoch, a period from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago also sometimes called the Ice Age, because the ice caps at the poles were much larger than today. They found that the well-preserved animal was a juvenile female, part of a vanished ecosystem dating to a time when northwestern Canada was home to American mastodons and other Pleistocene megafauna. Loveless quickly placed the frozen pup in a freezer until palaeontologists could have a look. It wasn’t a precious mineral, but the oldest and most complete wolf mummy ever discovered. While blasting a wall of permafrost with a water cannon to release whatever riches might be found inside, Neil Loveless saw something melting out of the ice. In the summer of 2016, a gold miner in Canada’s Yukon Territory found an unexpected treasure.
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