This photo shows a closeup of the wolf pup’s head, showing her teeth. Credit: Government of Yukon
SciTechDaily has a story about a mummified wolf puppy found in the Canadian Yukon. The gray wolf pup lived about 57,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene. It's 100% intact and very well preserved. It was discovered by a gold miner that was using water to blast a wall of frozen mud. All the details are in a paper in the journal Current Biology.
While water blasting at a wall of frozen mud in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made an extraordinary discovery: a perfectly preserved wolf pup that had been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years. The remarkable condition of the pup, named Zhùr by the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people, gave researchers a wealth of insights about her age, lifestyle, and relationship to modern wolves. The findings appear December 21 in the journal Current Biology.
“She’s the most complete wolf mummy that’s ever been found. She’s basically 100% intact–all that’s missing are her eyes,” says first author Julie Meachen, an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines University. “And the fact that she’s so complete allowed us to do so many lines of inquiry on her to basically reconstruct her life.”
One of the most important questions about Zhùr that the researchers sought to answer was how she ended up preserved in permafrost to begin with. It takes a unique combination of circumstances to produce a permafrost mummy.
“It’s rare to find these mummies in the Yukon. The animal has to die in a permafrost location, where the ground is frozen all the time, and they have to get buried very quickly, like any other fossilization process,” says Meachen. “If it lays out on the frozen tundra too long it’ll decompose or get eaten.”
