The head of an ancient wolf was discovered in its entirety in summer 2018 by a mammoth tusk hunter in Siberia's Yakutia area while spelunking along the Tirekhtyak River. The specimen is the only adult Pleistocene steppe wolf partial carcass ever discovered and has been preserved for almost 32,000 years by the region's permafrost, or permanently frozen ground.
The specimen is the first (partial) carcass of an adult Pleistocene steppe wolf—an extinct lineage distinct from modern wolves—ever found Courtesy of Dr. Tori Herridge
The discovery, which was initially published by the Siberian Times, was expected to aid experts in understanding how steppe wolves differed from modern wolves and why the species eventually became extinct.
The wolf in issue was fully grown, perhaps between the ages of 2 and 4, according to Marisa Iati of the Washington Post. Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, was filming a documentary in Siberia when the tusk hunter arrived on the scene with the severed head in tow. She says that media reports touting the find as a "giant wolf" are false, despite photographs of the severed head measuring 15.7 inches long and showing clumps of fur, fangs, and a well-preserved snout.
“If you disregard the frozen clump of permafrost adhered to where the neck would [usually] have been”, Dalén told Smithsonian magazine that “the animal was not significantly larger than a current wolf.”
In order to create a digital model of the animal's brain and the interior of its skull, a Russian team led by Albert Protopopov of the Republic of Sakha's Academy of Sciences was working on the project, according to CNN.
Given the head's level of preservation, David Stanton, a scientist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History who was conducting the genetic investigation of the remains, told Smithsonian that he and his team were optimistic that they could extract viable DNA and use it to decode the wolf's genome.
It is now unknown precisely how the wolf's head came to be detached from the rest of its body. In an interview with Smithsonian, evolutionary biologist Tori Herridge of the Natural History Museum in London said that Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan believes that scans of the animal's head may reveal evidence of its deliberate severance by humans, possibly "contemporaneously with the wolf dying." Herridge points out that if this is the case, the discovery would provide "a unique example of human interaction with carnivores." Yet she ends her Twitter post by saying, "I am reserving judgment until more investigation [is] done."
Herridge was hesitant, and Dalén repeated him, claiming that he had "seen no evidence convincing" him that people chopped off their heads. After all, fragmentary sets of bones are frequently discovered in the Siberian permafrost. For instance, if an animal was only partially buried and then frozen, the remainder of its body might have rotted or been consumed by scavengers. Alternately, it's likely that the corpse split into several pieces due to changes in the permafrost over thousands of years.
A Russian team is currently building a digital model of the animal’s brain and the interior of its skull Albert Protopopov
Stanton claimed that steppe wolves were "probably slightly larger and more robust than modern wolves." The animals, which had a powerful, broad jaw designed for hunting giant herbivores like woolly mammoths and rhinos, vanished between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, or approximately the same period that modern wolves first appeared, according to Stanton, who spoke to N'dea Yancey-Bragg of USA Today. If the scientists are successful in obtaining DNA from the wolf's head, they will try to use it to ascertain whether the prehistoric wolves interbred with contemporary ones, how inbred the older species was, and whether the lineage possessed—or lacked—any genetic adaptations that contributed to its extinction.
As of now, a variety of well-preserved prehistoric animals have been discovered in the Siberian permafrost, including a 42,000-year-old foal, a cave lion cub, a "exquisite ice bird complete with feathers," as noted by Herridge, and "even a delicate Ice Age moth." These discoveries, in Dalén's opinion, can be largely due to a rise in mammoth tusk hunting and accelerated permafrost melting associated with global warming.
"The warming climate... means that more and more of these specimens are likely to be found in the future," Stanton stated in his interview with Smithsonian.
He also noted that "it is also likely that many of [them] will thaw out and decompose (and therefore be lost) before anyone can find... and study them."
