Two ancient wolf pups found entombed in Siberian permafrost more than a decade ago are revealing new stories, thanks to rich DNA clues preserved inside their bodies.In a first, researchers found a chunk of meat from a woolly rhinoceros — a creature similar in size to modern white rhinoceros, but with a shaggy coat of hair — preserved inside the stomach of one of the pups. DNA from that flesh and fur survived beneath the Siberian ice for more than 14,000 years, enabling scientists to sequence the entire genome. They shared their findings in a study published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution on Wednesday.“This is the first time an entire genome has been reconstructed from an Ice Age animal that was inside another Ice Age animal,” said Camilo Chacón-Duque, an author of the study and an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. “It’s a high quality, high resolution genome.”The piece of woolly rhinoceros tissue found in the stomach of the preserved wolf pup in Stockholm in 2020. (Love Dalén)The woolly rhinoceros in question died some 14,400 years ago, just a few hundred years before the species disappeared from the fossil record. That means researchers now have a snapshot of the species genome right before it was snuffed out.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“This sample is by far the youngest woolly rhinoceros that has been sequenced — with youngest, I mean the closest to the extinction of the species,” Chacón-Duque said.Evolutionary biologists have long debated whether hunters or climate change ultimately doomed the woolly rhinoceros. The new genomic data suggests the population may have been healthy right up until the end — before something caused it to crash.Tumat-1 wolf pup in Vienna in 2018. (Mietje Germonpré)A group of ivory hunters looking for mammoth tusks found the first of the two small puppies in Siberia about 15 years ago. Four years later, they discovered the other.The hunters couldn’t have known that these mummified animals — known now as the “Tumat puppies” — would helping scientists unravel the fate of a different species.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe puppies, both females, were likely littermates: They were found within about 6 feet of each another and shared some DNA characteristics, according to research published last year in Quaternar …
