While the water was blasting at a frozen mud wall in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made a unique discovery-a perfectly preserved wolf pup believed to have been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years.
This outstanding condition of the pup, which the local Tr'ondëk Hwëch' called Zhùr in people, gave scientists a wealth of understandings about the mummy's age, lifestyle, and association with modern wolves.
The said study findings appeared in the Current Biology journal on December 21. According to Julie Meachen, the study's first author and an anatomy associate professor at Des Moines University, the discovery "is the most complete wolf mummy that's ever been found."
More so, she added that the mummy's so complete enabled the study authors to do "so many lines of inquiry on her" to fundamentally rebuild her life.
A Rare Discovery
One of the essential questions about Zhur that the study authors were seeking to answer was how "she ended up preserved in permafrost, to begin with." It takes an extraordinary combination of conditions to produce a permafrost mummy.
It is unusual to discover such mummies in Yukon. The animal needs to die in a permafrost site. The ground is constantly frozen, and they need to get buried vary fast, like any other fossilization process, explained Meachen.
The first author also said that if "it lays out on the frozen tundra for a long time," it is likely to get eaten, or it will decompose.
Another essential aspect is the wolf's manner of death. A SciTechDaily report specified that animals dying slowly or are hunted by predators have less possibility to be discovered in pristine condition.
Meachen said they think Zhur was "in her den and died right way by den collapse." Furthermore, data presented that the animal did not starve and was about seven weeks old when she died, so "we feel a bit better knowing" it didn't take long for this poor little thing to suffer.
Discovering Zhur's Diet
On top of learning how the new discovery died, the team assessed her diet, too. As a result, Zhur's diet was strongly "influenced by how close she lived to water."
Usually, when one thinks of wolves in the Ice Age, he thinks of them "eating bison or musk oxen, or other large animals on land." One surprising thing, the first author elaborated, was that she ate aquatic resources, specifically salmon.
Assessing the genome of Zhur also verified that she is descended from ancient wolves from countries including Siberia, Alaska, and Russia, who are also the modern wolves' ancestors.
Even though evaluating Zhur provided the researchers many answers about the ancient wolves, there were some remarkable questions about Zhur and her family.
Meachen said they had been asked why she was the lone wolf discovered in the den and what happened to her mother or her siblings.
It could be that she was the lone pup. Or, other wolves were not in the same den its collapse. Unfortunately, said the first author, "we'll never know."
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