What a Wolf's Last Meal Reveals About Woolly Rhino Extinction
Scientists analyzed DNA from the stomach of a 14,400-year-old wolf.
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Media Editors:
John P. Rafferty, Lee Goldstein
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Transcript
So what does the last meal of a 14,000-year-old wolf pup have to do with woolly rhinoceros extinction?
Hi, my name is John Rafferty. I'm a senior editor covering Earth and life sciences for Britannica.
Recently, a multinational team of scientists working in Siberia discovered a pair of wolf pups in the permafrost.
In the process of doing their research, they looked at the stomachs, and in one of them they found a morsel of woolly rhinoceros flesh.
The flesh was not digested, which gave scientists the opportunity to sequence and analyze the DNA of that flesh.
One thing the scientists expected is a build up of genetic errors.
For many years scientists believed that the wooly rhinoceros went extinct over the course of thousands of years.
The population is going down, so what you're finding [is] genetic mutations that stem from inbreeding result.
However, the scientists discovered in this chunk of flesh that it did not have the build up of genetic errors.
It suggests that the population did not go extinct over thousands of years but rather only a few hundred.
Now I want to just say that there's still a lot more to learn, but this sample in particular, it's remarkable in that it's the youngest one that we know of, but it's also remarkable in that it was found in the body of something else.
The scientists could determine so much about the organism, about when it went extinct.
And it helps to rewrite what we think we know about this animal's history.
Hi, my name is John Rafferty. I'm a senior editor covering Earth and life sciences for Britannica.
Recently, a multinational team of scientists working in Siberia discovered a pair of wolf pups in the permafrost.
In the process of doing their research, they looked at the stomachs, and in one of them they found a morsel of woolly rhinoceros flesh.
The flesh was not digested, which gave scientists the opportunity to sequence and analyze the DNA of that flesh.
One thing the scientists expected is a build up of genetic errors.
For many years scientists believed that the wooly rhinoceros went extinct over the course of thousands of years.
The population is going down, so what you're finding [is] genetic mutations that stem from inbreeding result.
However, the scientists discovered in this chunk of flesh that it did not have the build up of genetic errors.
It suggests that the population did not go extinct over thousands of years but rather only a few hundred.
Now I want to just say that there's still a lot more to learn, but this sample in particular, it's remarkable in that it's the youngest one that we know of, but it's also remarkable in that it was found in the body of something else.
The scientists could determine so much about the organism, about when it went extinct.
And it helps to rewrite what we think we know about this animal's history.