Jan 14 : About 14,400 years ago, a weeks-old wolf puppy ate its last meal – meat from a woolly rhinoceros – shortly before dying on the harsh Ice Age landscape of northeastern Siberia. In a first, researchers have extracted DNA and recovered the rhino’s genome from a chunk of undigested meat from the stomach contents found in the puppy’s remains, discovered in permafrost near the village of Tumat. These genome findings provided insight into the fate of this impressive cold-adapted horned herbivore species once common in northern Europe and Asia. The researchers compared this rhino’s genome to those of two other individuals from the same species that lived thousands of years earlier – about 18,000 and 49,000 years ago – to examine genetic changes over time. In doing so, they learned that the woolly rhinoceros as a species remained genetically healthy until the end of the Ice Age before apparently suffering a rapid population collapse, probably because the warming climate erased their preferred steppe-tundra environment. For instance, the newly recovered genome showed no evidence …