Perfectly preserved wolf pup unearthed from Yukon permafrost

Well-preserved remains of an ancient wolf pup have offered scientists new insights into the relationship between Paleolithic and modern wolves.

The wolf pup, described Monday in the journal Current Biology, was found by a gold miner in the Canadian Yukon while water-blasting a wall of frozen mud.

The local Tr'ondÃ«k HwÃ«ch'in people, descendants of the HÃ¤n-speaking people who have occupied the region for thousands of years, named the pup ZhÃ¹r.

"She's the most complete wolf mummy that's ever been found. She's basically 100 percent intact -- all that's missing are her eyes," Julie Meachen, an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines University and first author of the new study, said in a news release. "And the fact that she's so complete allowed us to do so many lines of inquiry on her to basically reconstruct her life."

When researchers were first alerted to the discovery, they wanted to figure out how the wolf pup came to be frozen in the permafrost.

"It's rare to find these mummies in the Yukon," said Meachen. "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.

If newly deceased remains exposed on the tundra for too long, it will begin to decompose or get eaten by scavengers.

Often, the event that kills a well-preserved animal is the same event that ensures her preservation -- events like floods or mudslides. Animals that are killed by predators aren't likely to become quickly buried and preserved.

"We think she was in her den and died instantaneously by den collapse," Meachen said of the wolf pup. "Our data showed that she didn't starve and was about seven weeks old when she died, so we feel a bit better knowing the poor little girl didn't suffer for too long."

Often, researchers think of wolves as hunters of large prey. During the Ice Age, wolves tracked and killed bison and musk oxen. But analysis of the wolf pup's intestines revealed the remains of salmon and other aquatic species.

Analysis of the pup's genome revealed the Paleolithic wolf was closely related to the ancient wolves of Russia, Siberia and Alaska, the ancestors of modern wolves.

Though ZhÃ¹r's remains offered scientists a glimpse of what life was like for young wolves during the Middle Paleolithic, some questions about the pup's tragic fate remain unanswered.

"We've been asked why she was the only wolf found in the den, and what happened to her mom or siblings," said Meachen. "It could be that she was an only pup. Or the other wolves weren't in the den during the collapse. Unfortunately, we'll never know."

Having been cleaned and preserved, ZhÃ¹r is slated to go on display at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon.

As rising temperatures across the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra continue to thaw the region's permafrost, scientists expected more Ice Age animals to be unearthed.

"One small upside of climate change is that we're going to find more of these mummies as permafrost melts," said Meachen. "That's a good way for science to reconstruct that time better, but it also shows us how much our planet is actually warming. We really need to be careful."

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