TORONTO -- It was bad luck for the tiny wolf puppy — the den she was sleeping in collapsed, burying her underneath the sediment.
But the circumstances of her death were good luck for the gold miner who discovered her perfectly preserved body, still covered in fur, near Dawson City, Yukon, more than 50,000 years later.
The miraculous find was described in a paper published in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
The wolf puppy was named Zhur by the local Tr’ondek Hwech’in people, a word that means “wolf” in the Han language of their community.
“Zhur is the most complete specimen of a mummified Pleistocene gray wolf known,” the paper states.
She was discovered in the summer of 2016 by a gold miner named Neil Loveless, preserved in thawing permafrost in the Klondike goldfields.
The pup was so well preserved that bumps on her lips, called papillae, were still intact, along with genitalia, skin and claws. Although Zhur is a gray wolf, the fur that still covered her body was a rusty orange, and she was a little under half a metre long, from snout to the base of her tail.
Researchers used radiographs to estimate her age when she died. Assuming her bones ossified at roughly the same rate as a domestic dog, researchers estimated she died at around six to seven weeks old.
It's believed she died in the summer, July or early August, and that she had already been weaned from her mother.
To discover her geological age — the time her body had spent in the ground after her death — researchers extracted her DNA from the ancient hair follicles still present on her body. From genomic sequencing alone, they were able to estimate that she had lived around 75,000 to 56,000 years ago. Looking at the molecular isotopes from oxygen in Zhur’s tooth enamel allowed them to narrow the timezone further, to roughly 57,000 to 56,000 years ago.
It’s not unusual to find fossils of gray wolves in Alaska and Yukon dating back to the Late Pleistocene, although it is very unusual to find one this well-preserved.
Researchers believe Zhur and her mother largely ate fish from the nearby Klondike River, over terrestrial sources of food. Over her short life, she never went hungry, according to the paper.
Dying as she did — suddenly, due to a cave-in — is the reason that she was able to make it to the 21st century in such well-preserved detail, researchers say, because she was not exposed to predators and other creatures that could have disturbed her body.
