Wolf’s dinner preserved in Siberia for 14,400 years sheds light on woolly rhino | Extinct wildlife

Researchers have shed light on the last centuries of the woolly rhino’s existence after studying a hairy piece of meat from the stomach of an ancient wolf cub mummified in Siberian permafrost.

The beautifully preserved remains of a two-month-old female wolf were discovered in 2011 near the village of Tumat in northeastern Siberia. The animal is believed to have died 14,400 years ago when a landslide destroyed its den, trapping the cub and others inside.

The frigid conditions preserved the wolf for millennia, and upon examining the remains, scientists discovered that its stomach contents were also intact. Part of the wolf’s last meal was a piece of woolly rhinoceros, a large herbivore that became extinct about 14,000 years ago.

The discovery represents a rare opportunity, said Dr. Camilo Chacón-Duque, who until recently was a researcher at the Center for Paleogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. If they could obtain the rhino’s genetic makeup from the partially digested meat, it could reveal the state of the species as it heads toward extinction.

Although there is a shortage of well-preserved latter-day specimens of many species, recovering the genomes of animals that lived just before extinction is “a challenge,” Chacón-Duque said. But in principle, the genetic code could provide valuable clues about the events that caused the animals to disappear.

In Genome Biology and Evolution, the researchers describe how they decoded the woolly rhino genome from the tangled piece of meat. This is the first time this feat has been achieved for an Ice Age beast found in the stomach of another animal. “To our knowledge, this is the youngest woolly rhino for which we have the genome,” Chacón-Duque said.

Scientists expected to see signs of “genomic erosion,” in which a declining species loses its genetic diversity, often due to population bottlenecks, inbreeding and environmental pressures. This, combined with an accumulation of harmful mutations, makes species more vulnerable to extinction. But that’s not what the researchers saw.

“What we found was nothing like that,” Chacón-Duque said. After comparing woolly rhino DNA with the genomes of two older specimens dated 18,000 and 49,000 years ago, the researchers concluded that the population remained quite large and stable before disappearing quite quickly. “Whatever killed the species was relatively quick,” Chacón-Duque added, and probably struck in the 300 to 400 years before the woolly rhino disappeared.

Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at the Center for Paleogenetics, said woolly rhinos appeared to have had a viable population for 15,000 years after the first humans arrived in the region, suggesting that global warming rather than hunting wiped them out. The main culprit was a period of abrupt warming during the last ice age, known as the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial, which transformed the landscape between 14,700 and 12,900 years ago.

It’s unclear exactly how the cub fed on the woolly rhino, but it may have scavenged the carcass after being killed by the pack, or it may have received the treat from a pack member who regurgitated the hairy morsel.

The remains of a second cub, believed to be the first’s sister, were found at the same site in 2015. Tests showed that both had started eating solid foods but were still taking their mother’s milk.