18,000-year-old puppy found frozen put on display by Russia museum
Further tests, however, left the scientists with more questions than answers — they couldn’t definitively tell whether it was a dog or a wolf.
Blade news services
Mon, 02 Dec 2019 19:18:44 GMT
YAKUTSK, Russia — Russian scientists on Monday showed off a prehistoric puppy, believed to be 18,000 years old, found in permafrost in the country’s Far East.
Discovered last year in a lump of frozen mud near the city of Yakutsk, the puppy, named Dogor, is unusually well-preserved, with hair, teeth, whiskers, and eyelashes still intact.
“This puppy has all its limbs, pelage — fur, even whiskers. The nose is visible. There are teeth. We can determine due to some data that it is a male,” Nikolai Androsov, director of the Northern World private museum where the remains are stored, said at the Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum.
In recent years Russia’s Far East has provided riches for scientists studyingremains of ancient animals. As the permafrost melts, affected by climate change, more parts of woolly mammoths, canines, and other prehistoric animals are being discovered.
“Why has Yakutia come through a real spate of such unique findings over the last decade? First it’s global warming. It really exists, we feel it, and local people feel it strongly. Winter comes later, spring comes earlier,” Sergei Fyodorov, scientist with the North Eastern Federal University, told the Associated Press.
“And the second very serious, deep reason, of why there a lot of finds is the very high price of mammoth tusk in the Chinese market.”
When the puppy was discovered, scientists from the Stockholm-based Center for Palaeogenetics took a piece of bone to study its DNA.
“The first step was of course to send the sample to radio carbon dating to see how old it was and when we got the results back it turned out that it was roughly 18,000 years old,” Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genetics at the center, said in an online interview.
Further tests, however, left the scientists with more questions than answers — they couldn’t definitively tell whether it was a dog or a wolf.
“We have now generated a nearly complete genome sequence from it and normally when you have a two-fold coverage genome, which is what we have, you should be able to relatively easily say whether it’s a dog or a wolf, but we still can’t say and that makes it even more interesting,” Mr. Dalen said.
An 18,000-year-old prehistoric puppy found in permafrost in the Russia's Far East is on display Monday at the Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum, Russia.
Russian scientists have presented a unique prehistoric canine, believed to be 18,000 years old and found in permafrost in the Russia's Far East.