The 14,000 year old puppy was found preserved in ice with a portion of extinct woolly rhinoceros inside its stomach. The young creature, officially a prehistoric canine, was either a dog or a wolf and contained furry tissue from its final meal. DNA analysis by Stockholm’s Natural History Museum previously confirmed the hairy hide within the canine was woolly rhino and not – as originally believed – a cave lion, according to National Geographic earlier this year.
At 14,400 years old, this means the dog consumed one of the last creatures from a species which died out around this time. Dr Sergey Fedorov, from Russia‘s North-Eastern Federal University, said: “I am very happy that DNA analysis has confirmed this as a woolly rhino. I noticed that the shape of the skin was rather strange. It was rectangular.
My experience of taxidermy shows that skin could not tear like this in a natural way, if it was bitten off by an animal, for example. It seems likely this piece of skin with such even edges was cut artificially by an ancient human.
“The puppy perhaps found the butchering waste of the carcass. When I saw this piece in its stomach was amazed. I thought it could be the trace of human activity.”
A small branch was also found within the canine’s stomach. The puppy was famously excavated at Tumat, in the Sakha Republic of Siberia, in 2011. Since then a second frozen puppy has been discovered nearby and its stomach is now to be examined thoroughly.
Professor Love Dalen, an evolutionary genetics expert at the Centre for Palaeogenetics — a joint venture between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History — previously shed light on how researchers uncovered that the puppy’s final meal had consisted of rhino.
“We have a reference database and mitochondrial DNA from all mammals, so we checked the sequence data against that and the results that came back – it was an almost perfect match for woolly rhinoceros,” he told CNN.
“It’s completely unheard of. I’m not aware of any frozen Ice Age carnivore where they have found pieces of tissue inside.”
He went on to say: “This puppy, we know already, has been dated to roughly 14,000 years ago. We also know that the woolly rhinoceros (became) extinct 14,000 years ago. So, potentially, this puppy has eaten one of the last remaining woolly rhinos.”
Fedorov was speaking following Professor Dalen’s speculation regarding an alternative cause of death for the animal. “This puppy must have died very shortly after eating the rhino, because it’s not very digested,” he said.
“We don’t know if it was a wolf, but if it was a wolf cub, maybe it came across a baby rhino that was dead, or the (adult) wolf ate the baby rhino. Maybe as they were eating it, the mother rhino had her revenge.”