GoKawiilA 14,400-year-old wolf puppy’s last meal is shedding light on the last days of one of the Ice Age’s most iconic megafauna species, the woolly rhinoceros.
When researchers dissected the frozen mummified remains of an Ice Age wolf puppy, they found a partially digested chunk of meat in its stomach: the remnants of the puppy’s last meal 14,400 years ago. DNA testing revealed that the meat was a prime cut of woolly rhinoceros, a now-extinct 2-metric-ton behemoth that once stomped across the tundras of Europe and Asia. Stockholm University paleogeneticist Sólveig Guðjónsdóttir and her colleagues recently sequenced a full genome from the piece of meat, which reveals some secrets about woolly rhino populations in the centuries before their extinction.
Credit: Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026 Scientists carefully autopsy the remains of a wolf puppy who lived and died 14,400 years ago near Tumat village in Sibera. Scientists carefully autopsy the remains of a wolf puppy who lived and died 14,400 years ago near Tumat village in Sibera. Credit: Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026
One bad day for a rhino, one giant leap for paleogenomics
“Sequencing the entire genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal has never been done before,” said Uppsala University paleogeneticist Camilo Chacón-Duque, a coauthor of the study, in a recent press release.
Scientists found the freeze-dried corpse of the wolf puppy—and her sister—eroding out of the permafrost near the Siberian village of Tumat in 2011 and 2015. When the team brought the puppy to a lab for dissection in 2022, they found small pieces of her last meal still in her stomach. DNA sequencing identified the meat as woolly rhino (or Coelodonta antiquitatis, if you’re fancy) and the puppies as wolves, not dogs.
But extracting a full genome’s worth of DNA from the rhino meat was a challenge. After 14,400 years in the permafrost, DNA molecules break down, leaving genomicists only small, degraded strings. Sorting the rhino’s DNA from the wolf’s was also no small feat.
The rhino’s DNA suggests that it came from a genetically healthy population that was large enough to avoid inbreeding. Inbreeding leaves its mark in descendants’ genomes in the form of long strings of homozygous genes, in which the individual inherits the same version, or allele, of a gene from both parents. It’s normal to have some homozygous genes, but a genome laden with lots of long stretches of homozygosity could be a sign of inbreeding over several generations. The Tumat rhino (or what was left of it) showed no such signs.