Last
summer, a Russian man was strolling along the shore of the local Tirekhtyakh
River in Yakutia when he came upon a grisly sight: the severed head of an
ancient wolf. The head had been well preserved by the permafrost and still
sported a full head of hair and sharp fangs.
The man,
Pavel Efimov, handed the ancient head over to scientists, who dated it to over
40,000 years ago, or the end of the Pleistocene epoch, according
to The Siberian Times. Their analysis also revealed that the wolf was
fully grown and was between 2 and 4 years old when it died. [Image
Gallery: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]
The
severed head is 16 inches (40 centimeters) long. That's about half the size of
a modern wolf's body, which can range from 26 inches (66 cm) to 34 inches (86
cm) long, according to The Siberian Times.
These are
the first remains to be found of a well-preserved, fully grown wolf from the
Pleistocene, according to the Times. But people have previously found other
remains of ancient wolves, such as a mummified
wolf pup that lived over 50,000 years ago in Canada. Back in
2015, scientists analyzed the evolutionary split between dogs and wolves using
DNA from a 35,000-year-old wolf rib bone discovered in Siberia, Live
Science previously reported.
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