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There are clues to the life of the Ice Age tucked away inside the remains of the period. In a rare new finding, one of those frozen time capsules – a former puppy – had an additional surprise waiting in its womb.
Researchers recently discovered the 14,000-year-old mummified canine, which still has intact fur and teeth. Inside the stomach, scientists found the remains of another animal, with yellow fur.
DNA sequencing indicates that the Ice Age puppy ate pieces of a woolly rhino shortly before it died. A previous autopsy led to the conclusion that the megafauna turned meal was a cave lion, this idea is now overturned. The analysis was part of a larger study on woolly rhinos published this week Current biology.
The discovery may lead to new ideas about ancient dog populations, the history of evolution, and how a puppy successfully ingested a massive prehistoric animal.
Researcher Edana Lord, a Ph.D. student at the Center for Paleogenetics, recounts Reverse that the discovery of the woolly rhinoceros was “quite unexpected”.
“As far as we know, it is very unusual to find tissue from another animal preserved in the stomach,” Lord says, “although some studies have been done on plant remains from the contents of the stomach.”
Lord and his colleagues named the puppy mummy Tumat, after the Siberian site where it was discovered in 2011.
Preserving history – Genetic analysis of ancient dogs and rhinos is made possible by both permafrost and mummification.
The frozen ground in Siberia preserves ancient animals. It’s “essentially like a giant freezer, keeping things cold for thousands of years,” says Lord. When an animal is buried soon after death – for example, if it falls into a crevice – it can mummify, she says.
The result is a sample that is both frozen in time and literally frozen, giving researchers a glimpse into life at the end of the Ice Age. This is how we end up with ancient dogs like Tumat and Dogor, an 18,000-year-old sample of fur already discovered by some of the same researchers. Dogor’s DNA analysis placed the puppy somewhere between a wolf and a dog.
“Working on these types of specimens gives us a better understanding of what Ice Age animals looked like [compared to their modern counterparts]Lord said. Well-preserved samples provide more detailed evidence of diet and health, including a dog’s final meal.
Specimens that retain their fur and tissue are also easier subjects for DNA analysis, Lord says. They “tend to have much higher DNA levels, so we can get more genetic information from them and even sequence all of their genomes,” she explains.
“This allows us to ask a whole host of questions regarding their population and their evolutionary history.”
Tumat’s diet raises a puzzling question: How did a puppy manage to eat a woolly rhino in the first place? Lord thinks Tumat may have been part of a pack of scavengers – ancient canines who worked together to bring down the megafauna.
It’s also possible that someone else was involved in the hunt – such as another carnivore or a primitive human. “It is certainly very interesting to speculate,” Lord said.
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