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Frozen in the Flesh: Ice Age Mummies

KRA123 Offline
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#1
( This post was last modified: 11-08-2020, 10:13 AM by KRA123 )

This is a thread primarily intended to catalogue preserved mummies of Pleistocene animals - one of the very best tools we have for understanding the appearance, ecology and perhaps even the genetics of these extinct creatures. Despite the thread title, entries don't have to be perfectly preserved mummies, any preserved partial or complete non-skeletal remains will do. Preservation also does not also have to be in ice, but can also be through petrification or dehydration, etc.  Please indicate the species as the first line in your posts and keep all post about a single species, for the sake of making things more organized. 
I don't have the time to add many post right now, but I will come back eventually to add as many as I can.

So, to get the catalogue started:

Woolly Rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis):

Recent find in Yakutia, Russia. I don't think it's been published yet. Photos from Vitalik Isaev's Facebook page.

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Sasha the Baby Woolly Rhino

Found in Yakutia, Russia, around 1000 years old (Source)

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The above images  are from a Daily Mail article which relates that the rhino is actually thought to have lived lived around 34000 years ago, and is around 3-4 years old. It's not clear if the calf is a male or a female.

2007 Woolly Rhino Mummy Find
 Frozen carcass of a female woolly rhino, ~39,000 years old; discovered by gold miners in the lower Kolyma River, far eastern Siberia. The total weight of the mummified corpse, including the skull, horns, remains of two right legs and other bones found separately, is approximately 1000 kg, the live animal was estimated to have weighed tat least 1.5 tons (source).


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Photograph by Vladimir Filippov

Starunia Woolly Rhinos

Several woolly rhino mummies have been found preserved in minerals and wax in Starunia, Poland.
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United Kingdom Sully Offline
Ecology & Rewilding
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#2

Exceptionally well-preserved ancient wolf pup plucked from permafrost

A gold miner in Canada has discovered what may be the most complete wolf pup mummy ever found. Locked in the permafrost for 57,000 years, the pup, now known as Zhùr, is so well preserved that scientists can learn a lot about her diet, genetics, life and death.

The permafrost has an amazing ability to preserve soft tissues from ancient animals. Mammoths turn up on a regular basis, with their DNA intact enough to conduct genetic studies. A previous wolf specimen was found to have intact RNA, which was thought to degrade much more quickly. And worms frozen for 40,000 years have even sprung back to life when warmed up and given food.

Zhùr joins the ranks as a particularly impressive specimen. The permafrost has preserved soft tissues like skin, fur and organs, giving scientists an incredible glimpse into the past, with surprising specificity.

"She's the most complete wolf mummy that's ever been found," says Julie Meachen, first author of the study. ”She's basically 100 percent intact – all that's missing are her eyes. And the fact that she's so complete allowed us to do so many lines of inquiry on her to basically reconstruct her life.”



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[color=var(--primaryTextColor)]Researchers were able to determine the age of the wolf pup at death by analyzing the development of her teeth and bones
Government of Yukon


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Judging by the development of her teeth and bones, the researchers estimate that she was around seven weeks old at the time of her death. Isotopes from her stomach contents indicate that, surprisingly, her diet came from aquatic sources, with salmon an apparent favorite.
For Zhùr to be this well preserved, she must have been buried very quickly in the frozen mud. She also seemed to be in good health prior to death, so the team surmises that she was in her den when it collapsed, killing her instantly. The researchers were even able to estimate what time of year she died – modern Alaskan wolves usually breed around April and give birth in early (Northern Hemisphere) summer, which would put Zhùr's death in July or early August.

The researchers analyzed her genome, and confirmed that she was related to ancient Beringian and Russian gray wolves – the ancestors of all living gray wolves.

As much as Zhùr may be able to tell us about her life and death, unanswered questions will of course always remain.

"We've been asked why she was the only wolf found in the den, and what happened to her mom or siblings," says Meachen. "It could be that she was an only pup. Or the other wolves weren't in the den during the collapse. Unfortunately, we'll never know."

Zhùr will go on display at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse, Canada. A paper describing the find was published in the journal Current Biology.
Source: Cell Press via Scimex
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United Kingdom Sully Offline
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A well-preserved woolly rhino with its last meal still intact found in the extreme north of Yakutia

The unique discovery was three or four years old when it died at least 20,000 years ago.


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It is the best preserved to date juvenile woolly rhino ever found in Yakutia, with a lot of its internal organs - including its teeth, part of the intestines, a lump of fat and tissues - kept intact for thousands of years in permafrost. Picture: Valery Plotnikov
The juvenile rhino with thick hazel-coloured hair and the horn, found next to the carcass was discovered in the middle of August in permafrost deposits by river Tirekhtyakh in the Abyisky ulus (district) of the Republic of Sakha.
The sensational discovery is still in the Arctic Yakutia waiting for ice roads to form, so that it can be delivered to scientists in the republic’s capital Yakutsk. 
It is the best preserved to date juvenile woolly rhino ever found in Yakutia, with a lot of its internal organs - including its teeth, part of the intestines, a lump of fat and tissues - kept intact for thousands of years in permafrost. 
‘The young rhino was between three and four years old and lived separately from its mother when it died, most likely by drowning’, said Dr Valery Plotnikov from the Academy of Sciences who has been to the discovery site and made the first description of the find. 
‘The gender of the animal is still unknown. We are waiting for the radiocarbon analyses to define when it lived, the most likely range of dates is between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. The rhino has a very thick short underfur, very likely it died in summer’, Dr Plotnikov said. 

*This image is copyright of its original author






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‘The young rhino was between three and four years old and lived separately from its mother when it died, most likely by drowning’, said Dr Valery Plotnikov from the Academy of Sciences who has been to the discovery site and made the first description of the find. Pictures: Valery Plotnikov





The rhino’s carcass is 80 per cent intact; it was discovered by local resident Alexei Savvin close to the site where the world’s only baby woolly rhino called Sasha was dug out in 2014. Sasha’s aged has been since confirmed as 34,000 years. 
Two extinct cave lion cubs later called Boris and Sparta were also found in the Abyisky district of Yakutia last year close to the Tirekhtyakh River.
Sasha the wooly rhino was seven months old when it died and had lightly-coloured strawberry blond fur/hair. The baby rhino also had stubs of two horns.
Dr Plotnikov said of Sasha: ‘We have learned that woolly rhinoceroses were covered in very thick hair. Previously, we could judge this only from rock paintings discovered in France. 
'Now, judging by the thick coat with the undercoat, we can conclude that the rhinoceroses were fully adapted to the cold climate from a young age.’
Sasha the baby woolly rhino found in 2014 in Yakutia lived 34,000 years ago. Pictures: Albert Protopopov, The Siberian Times

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United Kingdom Sully Offline
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#4

This was posted elsewhere but belongs in this thread

First ever preserved grown up cave bear - even its nose is intact - unearthed on the Arctic island


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United Kingdom Sully Offline
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#5
( This post was last modified: 01-03-2021, 06:28 PM by Sully )

46,000-year-old bird found frozen in Siberia sheds light on the end of the ice age

The frozen carcass of a horned lark discovered in northeast Siberia by fossil ivory hunters could help scientists better understand how the ecosystem evolved at the end of the last ice age, new research suggests.

Scientists said they extracted DNA from the “exceptionally well-preserved” ancient bird carcass that they determined was roughly 46,000 years old, according to an article published Friday in the journal Communications Biology. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History studied the female bird after it was found in 2018 in a permafrost tunnel in Siberia’s Belaya Gora area.


The discovery offers new information about how the mammoth steppe, a cold and dry biome that covered northern Europe and Asia, divided into three types of biological environments when the ice age ended about 11,700 years ago. The steppe, which was home to now-extinct species including the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, separated into tundra, taiga — coniferous forest — and steppe.

“Our results support this theory since the diversification of the horned lark into these sub species seems to have happened about at the same time as the mammoth steppe disappeared,” Love Dalén, a professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and a research leader at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, said in a statement.

Researchers said the bird carcass will also help them better understand how the horned lark evolved. They said they hope to map its genome and compare it with the genomes of all other subspecies of horned larks.

For now, genetic analysis suggests the bird was an ancestor of a subspecies of horned lark in Siberia and another subspecies in Mongolia, Nicolas Dussex, a zoologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement.


Siberia has been the site of several frozen findings, many of which were studied by some of the same scientists who researched the horned lark. Last year, the researchers published studies of a 30,000-year-old severed wolf head and a puppy named Dogor that was frozen for 18,000 years.



In the broader Arctic, people have uncovered frozen mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, horses, bison and wolverines, the researchers wrote in their new study. Paleontologists can use those remains to understand how climate change impacts those species and to study the evolution of a particular animal.
Although the scientists wrote that fossil ivory hunters’ methods of excavation can harm scientifically valuable animal remains, they said the preserved tissues and organs of frozen carcasses give them better information about gene expression than they can get from skeletal remains.
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United Kingdom Sully Offline
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#6

Mummified head and neck of an adult female Lena horse (Equus lenensis) with well preserved skin and fur. It was locked in the Siberian permafrost for over 29,000 years.


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United Kingdom Sully Offline
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Mummified baby woolly mammoth found by gold miner in the Klondike


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