14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros DNA extracted from wolf’s stomach
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Towards the end of the last ice age, an ancient wolf feasted on a young woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). When the wolf died, it ended up buried in Siberian permafrost for about 14,000 years until it was uncovered by paleontologists in 2015. Luckily for scientists, some woolly rhinoceros tissue remained inside of the wolf’s stomach. Now, these genetic detectives analyzed the woolly rhino’s genome and found that the species likely went extinct due to rapid population collapse and not a slow decline as Earth’s climate warmed. The findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. “Sequencing the entire genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal has never been done before,” Camilo Chacón-Duque, a study co-author and paleogenomicist at Stockholm University in Sweden, said in a statement. “Recovering genomes from individuals that lived right before extinction is challenging, but it can provide important clues on what caused …

