Russian scientists from the Mammoth Museum Laboratory of the North-Eastern Federal University in the Russian Republic of Yakutia performed an autopsy on the mummified wolf.
It turns out that the discovery is about 44 thousand years old.
It was found in 2021 at a depth of 40 meters in the permafrost on the Terkhtyakh River in the Abyeisky region. According to the university, this is the first discovery of the mummy of an adult predator from the late Pleistocene era.
The permafrost has preserved them in a way that allows scientists to know what their prey ate and what bacteria lived at the time they lived in the mammoth steppe.
The wolf mummy was discovered by local residents on the Terkhtyakh River in the Abyeisky district of Yakutia in 2021. The animal was transferred for scientific research to the Republic Academy of Sciences. Scientists have found that the wolf lived in these places more than 44 thousand years ago, and was a contemporary of the mammoth.
Albert Protopopov, head of the department for the study of mammoths at the Academy of Sciences in Yakutia, said: “His stomach was preserved in isolation, and there are no pollutants in it, so we have the opportunity to find out what he ate, in addition to the fact that there are contents that his victims consumed, and then fell into his stomach.”
Brilliant!
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