14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros DNA extracted from wolf’s stomach
From PopSci.com:
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.
