Category Archives: RUSSIA

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Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia

Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia

An ancient dog finds in Russia in the Far East that he lived a glorious eighteen thousand years ago. It was found last year in a frozen mud near the city of Yakutsk in Siberia and has been given the affectionate name of “Dogor”.

Researchers carefully cleaned the specimen to reveal it was still mostly covered in fur

More surprising is that it is unusually good with intact fur, skin, whiskers, and eyelashes. It might look just like a sleeping old dog to the casual viewer!

The Russian Wolfhound, also known as the Borzoi breed, is a special dog of tremendous speed, known for the rather remote appearance, associated with Russia.

A quick online search showed that in Russia other dogs mixed wolves with hundreds of massive beast dogs that have been domesticated by patient owners. The owners insist these dogs are half-wolf; whether they’ve been genetically proven to be so is another matter.

That is what scientists believe they have found buried deep in the ice in the Far East reaches of Siberia; an almost perfectly preserved specimen that even retains its fur.

As yet, experts have not determined whether the animal is dog or wolf, but that riddle, they say, is half the fun of the quest. One thing is for sure, it looks like a puppy and perhaps is an evolutionary cross between wolf and dog.

The prehistoric puppy’s teeth, nose, the fur are all incredibly intact.

A piece of the puppy’s bone was immediately shipped off to Stockholm’s Centre for Paleogenetics to determine just what scientists were looking at.

They have determined the animal is 18,000 years old and is preserved perfectly, thanks to the ice in which it was buried.

The pup still has its whiskers, eyelashes, and nose intact.

“We have now generated a nearly complete genome sequence from it and normally when you have two-fold coverage genome, which is what we have, you should be able to relatively easily say whether it’s a dog or a wolf, but we still can’t say, and that makes it even more interesting,” said Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genetics at the centre.

Whatever the animal’s true ancestry turns out to be, the remains now have a name that applies in either case: Dogor, which is Yakutian for a friend.

Dogor remains are now kept at a private facility, the Northern World Museum. Museum director Nikolai Androsov said, at Dogor’s unveiling to the media, “this puppy has all its limbs…even whiskers.

The nose is visible. There are teeth. We can determine due to some data that it is male” he said at the presentation of Dogor at Yakutsk’s famed Mammoth Museum, which specializes in ancient remains and specimens.

How the prehistoric puppy perished is so far unknown, although scientists do know he was just eight weeks old. Researchers will no doubt continue testing to learn all they can about the fascinating creature.

Russia’s the Far East has provided many incredible finds and animal remains for scientists who study ancient animals in recent years.

Buried deep within Siberia’s permafrost, remains of woolly mammoths, canines and other prehistoric animals are being discovered whenever the ice melts. Mammoth tusk hunters are oftentimes the ones who discover them.

Who knows? One day Dogor the prehistoric puppy may become part of a Russian children’s story, or the basis of a movie. He has already joined other furry, famous canines in getting worldwide attention.

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Three Well-Preserved Ancient Boats Unearthed in Serbia

Probable Roman shipwrecks unearthed at a Serbian coal mine

Uryadovy Courier reported that coal miners in Serbia recently dug up an unexpected surprise: three probable Roman-era ships, buried in the mud of an ancient riverbed for at least 1,300 years.

The largest is a flat-bottomed river vessel 15 meters long, which seems to have been built with Roman techniques. Two smaller boats, each carved out from a single tree trunk, match ancient descriptions of dugout boats used by Slavic groups to row across the Danube River and attack the Roman frontier.

The Kostolac surface mine lies near the ancient Roman city of Viminacium, once a provincial capital and the base for a squadron of Roman warships on the Danube River.

When the Roman Empire ruled most of Southern Europe, the Danube or one of its larger branches flowed across the land now occupied by the mine.

The three ships lay atop a 15-meter- (49-foot-) deep layer of gravel, buried under seven meters (23 feet) of silt and clay, which preserved them for centuries in remarkably good condition—or did until the miners’ earthmoving equipment dug into the steep slope to excavate for the mine.

“The [largest] ship was seriously damaged by the mining equipment,” archaeologist Miomir Korac, director of the Archaeological Institute and head of the Viminacium Science Project, told Ars in an email. “Approximately 35 percent to 40 percent of the ship was damaged.

But the archaeological team collected all the parts, and we should be able to reconstruct it almost in full.” With any luck, that reconstruction will help archaeologists understand when the three ships were built and how they came to rest in the riverbed.

Social distancing makes it hard to get a date

The large ship had a single deck with at least six pairs of oars, along with fittings for a type of triangular sail called a lateen sail. It would have carried a crew of 30 to 35 sailors, and apparently it had a lengthy career: traces of repairs to the hull suggest a ship with some miles under it. Iron nails and other iron fittings held the ship’s timbers and planks together, and they’ve survived for centuries thanks to the silt and clay that sealed the ship away from oxygen and microbes.

By contrast, the dugout longboats were much simpler craft. Korac described them as “rudimentary,” although one had carved decorations on its hull.

Although elements of the largest ship’s construction are Roman, Korac says those same shipbuilding techniques may also have been used by later Byzantine or medieval shipwrights. Without radiocarbon dating or geological analysis of the sediment layers at the site, it’s impossible to be entirely sure when the ships were built. Korac and his colleagues have sent wood samples from preserved oak trees buried nearby to a lab for analysis, but the COVID-19 pandemic has held everything up.

“Coronavirus is setting all actions now,” he told Ars.

But the odds are in favor of the Kostolac ship being Roman in origin. Historical documents don’t mention any ports or other navigation infrastructure in the area after Viminacium fell to invading groups in the 600s CE. If that’s the case, then these three ships, wrecked together in the former bed of the Danube, may record a snapshot of either commerce or conflict on the Roman frontier.

Fight, flight, or founder?

Given the site’s proximity to the Roman naval base at Viminacium, it’s tempting to imagine a battle on the Danube between a Roman warship and attacking Slavic fighters in dugout longboats. Historical sources don’t mention any river battles near Kostolac, but they do mention a couple of battles further upriver, near the Roman ports of Singidunum and Sirmium.

But while there’s no evidence to rule out the idea of dueling river warships in a fight to the death, there’s no evidence pointing to a battle, either. None of the vessels has any trace of fire or other combat damage, and nothing about the largest ship conclusively identifies it as a warship rather than an ordinary river transport. The ship’s crew left no personal belongings or artifacts aboard; there’s just the ship and its fittings, beautifully preserved but perfectly empty.

“The lack of finds prevents us from identifying the boat without further analyses,” Korac told Ars.

On the other hand, the dugout longboats, called monoxylons, were something like landing craft. “A monoxylon is not a combat ship. It is just a way to cross the river and invade on land,” Korac told Ars. “Facing larger ships, monoxylons could be easily defeated, as it is testified in sources from [the] 6th century mentioning a Roman fleet from Singidunum repelling barbarian attacks on the Roman Empire.”

Korac suggested one possible scenario for the shipwrecks: “The ships were either abandoned or evacuated. They did not sink suddenly with cargo,” he told Ars. “If these happened during the barbarian invasion and withdrawal of Roman troops, the ship could be abandoned and sunken in order not to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

For now, further excavations and analysis are on hold, but all three shipwrecks have been relocated to the nearby archaeological park.

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Check out this striking 25,000-year-old hut built out of mammoth bones

Check out this striking 25,000-year-old hut built out of mammoth bones

Dr. Alexander J.E. Pryor, an archeological postdoctoral researcher at Southampton University, has recently published a research paper from Cambridge University Press.

The members of his team claiming they have found the oldest man-made structure in Russia about three hundred miles from Moscow. No one knows for certain why it was built.

Kostenki 11 is a large bone circle built during the Upper Paleolithic era, over 40,000 years ago. It’s located within the Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological complex in the Khokholsky District, Voronezh Oblast, Russia.

Close up of the structure, featuring long bones, a lower jaw (top middle) and articulated vertebrae.

The majority of the bones in the circle and the remnants of a bone hut were made from woolly mammoths, but bones from Arctic foxes, reindeer, bears, wolves, and horses have also been found, the findings were published in the journal Antiquity.

The archaeological site was discovered in 1951, but little work was done there until the 1960s when the first bone circle was discovered.

In 1970, another mammoth bone structure and a pit were discovered about sixty feet from the circle. Another five feet away is the newly discovered bone hut that is about forty-one feet in diameter and sits on a gradual slope.

The circle has no break for an entrance, but just outside are three small pits where burnt bones, ivory, and charcoal were found. They were carbon-dated to around twenty-five thousand years old.

Dwelling made with mammoth bones. Reconstruction based on the example of Mezhirich. Exhibit in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan

Some scientists believe the shelter may have been covered with animal skins, but Dr. Pryor does not believe it was a living abode as all of the common artifacts usually found among dwellings were absent.

According to The Independent, some researchers have suggested structures such as this might have been ritual monuments.

There is, however, no evidence for this conclusion. Another factor is that some of the bones were still stuck together indicating there was still animal material on them when they were stacked.

This would have been not only smelly but very dangerous, as it would attract predators.

The mammoth bone structure discovered.

Circular bone features such as this have been found in about twenty-five different locations in the Ukraine and Russia but none are as old as Kostenki 11, which is still being studied.

Built at the end of the last ice age when winters were long and harsh, reaching twenty degrees below zero on average, by the humans that didn’t travel south to escape the cold, Dr. Pryor believes the hut may have been used for food storage, as a garbage dump that would keep scavengers away from their living area, or even for rituals of some sort.

The Mammoth Bones structure seen from above

Evidence of tool usage including percussion rocks and striking platforms were found as well as over fifty small seeds that had been partially burned leading researchers to wonder if they were from native plants growing around the area or from plants that had been collected and brought to the site for consumption.

Three other pits in the same area tested exactly the same as the materials found at the bone hut according to Dr. Pryor’s research paper on Cambridge Core.

Dr. Pryor stated that Kostenki 11 is a rare site where scientists can learn more about hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era and how they survived in such a harsh climate, the height of the last ice age.

The site is providing information as to what places like this may have been used for. He notes that the people of that time used ingenuity in finding ways to survive using the materials available in their ice age environment.

Dr. E. James Dixon, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, is quoted by smithsonianmag.com saying that this is a “fascinating time period in Eurasian archaeology” and the study “clearly demonstrates that modern humans were adapted to higher latitudes at the very height of the last ice age.”

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A Mysterious 25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths

A Mysterious 25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths

Mysterious bone circles consisting of hundreds of mammoths bones helped scientists understand how people survived the last ice age. According to a new analysis, the bones at one location in Russia were more than 20,000 years old.

25,000-year-old mammoth bone structure, Kostenki, Russia: 12.5 meters in diameter

The wall of the 30 ft building was constructed using a combination of 51 lower jaws and 64 individual mammoth skulls. There were also a small number of reindeers, goats, rabbits, dogs, red foxes, and arctic fox bones.

Researchers said the bones were most likely sourced from animal graveyards.

In the site, which is situated near the current village of Kostenki, some 500 km south of Moscow, an archeologist from Exeter University discovered remains of charred wood and other soft non-woody plants.

It indicates that people used to burn wood as well as bones for fuel, and the communities who lived there had learned where to forage for edible plants during the Ice Age.

Dr. Alexander Pryor, who led the study, said: “Kostenki 11 represents a rare example of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers living on in this harsh environment.

“What might have brought ancient hunter-gatherers to this site?

“One possibility is that the mammoths and humans could have come to the area en masse because it had a natural spring that would have provided unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter – rare in this period of extreme cold.

“These finds shed new light on the purpose of these mysterious sites.

“Archaeology is showing us more about how our ancestors survived in this desperately cold and hostile environment at the climax of the last Ice Age.

“Most other places at similar latitudes in Europe had been abandoned by this time, but these groups had managed to adapt to find food, shelter, and water.”

The last Ice Age swept northern Europe between 75-18,000 years ago and reached its coldest and most severe state around 23-18,000 years ago.

Most communities fled the region, likely due to a lack of prey to hunt and scarce plant resources they depended upon for survival, the scientists said.

The bone circles, of which more than 70 are known to exist in Ukraine and the west Russian planes, were eventually abandoned as the climate grew colder and more inhospitable.

Archaeologists previously assumed the circular mammoth bone structures were used as dwellings, but the new study, published in the journal Antiquity, suggests this may not always have been the case.

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Liquid Blood Extracted From 42,000-Year-Old Foal Found Frozen in Siberia

Scientists Extracted Liquid Blood From 42,000-Year-Old Foal Found in Siberian Permafrost

On an expedition to the Batagaika crater in Siberia a team of Mammoth tusk hunters uncovered the nearly preserved remains of a 42,000-year-old foal.

Instead, the young foal showed no signs of external damage, retaining its fur, tail and hooves and the hair on its leg and head, has preserved by the permafrost of the region or permanently frozen ground.

The Siberian Times reports that Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University and the Biotech sooam researcher in South Korea extracted blood and urine from the specimen, paving the way for further analysis aimed at cloning the long-dead horse and resurrecting the extinct Lenskaya lineage to which it belongs.

Scientists will take viable cells from the blood samples and grow them in the laboratory in order to clone the animal. Perhaps they will consider looking at SciQuip’s range of incubators to stimulate the growth of the cells.

Over the past month, scientists have made more than 20 unsuccessful attempts to extract viable cells from the foal’s tissue (Semyon Grigoryev/North-Eastern Federal University)

This task is harder said than done. More than 20 attempts to grow cells from foal’s tissue have been made by the team over the past month, but they were all unsuccessful, according to a recent report from the Siberian Times. Russian researcher Lena Grigoryeva said that the participants remain “positive about the outcome.”

The fact that the horse still has hair makes it one of the most well-preserved Ice Age animals ever found, Grigoryev tells CNN’s Gianluca Mezzofiore, adding, “Now we can say what color was the wool of the extinct horses of the Pleistocene era.”

In life, the foal boasted a bay-colored body and a black tail and mane. Aged just one to two weeks old at the time of his death, the young Lenskaya, or Lena horse, met the same untimely demise as many similarly intact animals trapped in permafrost for millennia.

The scientists extracted liquid blood samples from the 42,000-year-old animal’s heart vessels (Semyon Grigoryev/North-Eastern Federal University)

The foal likely drowned in a “natural trap” of sorts-namely, mud that later froze into permafrost, Semyon Grigoryev of Yakutia’s Mammoth Museum told Russian news agency TASS, as reported by the Siberian Times.

“A lot of mud and silt which the foal gulped during the last seconds of the foal’s life were found inside its gastrointestinal tract,” Grigoryev says.

Researchers collect liquid blood from the ice age foal found frozen in Siberian permafrost.

This is only the second time researchers have extracted liquid blood from the remains of prehistoric creatures. In 2013, a group of Russian scientists accomplished the same feat using the body of a 15,000-year-old female woolly mammoth discovered by Grigoryev and his colleagues in 2013, as George Dvorsky reports for Gizmodo.

(It’s worth noting that the team studying the foal has also expressed hopes of cloning a woolly mammoth.) Significantly, the foal’s blood is a staggering 27,000 years older than this previous sample.

The NEFU and South Korean scientists behind the new research are so confident of their success that they have already begun searching for a surrogate mare to carry the cloned Lena horse and, in the words of the Siberian Times, fulfill “the historic role of giving birth to the comeback species.”

It’s worth noting, however, that any acclaim is premature and, as Dvorsky writes, indicative of the “typical unbridled enthusiasm” seen in the Russian news outlet’s reports.

Speaking with CNN’s Mezzofiore, Grigoryev himself expressed doubts about the researcher’s chances, explaining, “I think that even the unique preservation of blood is absolutely hopeless for cloning purposes since the main blood cells … do not have nuclei with DNA.”

He continued, “We are trying to find intact cells in muscle tissue and internal organs that are also very well-preserved.”

What the Siberian Times fails to address are the manifold “ethical and technological” questions raised by reviving long-gone species. Among other concerns, according to Dvorsky, scientists have cited the clone’s diminished quality of life, issues of genetic diversity and inbreeding, and the absence of an adequate Ice Age habitat.

It remains to be seen whether the Russian-South Korean team can actually deliver on its ambitious goal. Still, if the purported July 2018 resurrection of two similarly aged 40,000-year-old roundworms “defrosted” after millennia in the Arctic permafrost is any indication, the revival of ancient animals is becoming an increasingly realistic possibility.

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90,000-year-old human hybrid found in ancient cave

90,000-year-old human hybrid found in ancient cave

The idea of free love seems to have started even earlier than in the 1960s. A small bone fragment belonging to an ancient hominin called “Denny” by the team, who had a mother Neanderthal and a dad Denisovan-the two nearest extinct relatives of the living humans today, was discovered in an international team of researchers.

90,000-year-old bones provide the first direct evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and their close relatives the Denisovans.

The two races have been known to live on the Eurasian Mixed Continent, Neanderthals in the west of the continent until some 40,000 years ago and Denisovans in the east.

Previous genetic studies of ancient hominin remains have shown that they sometimes interbred, but Denny is the only known example of a first-generation child with equal parts Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA.

The bone fragment was found in 2012 at Denisova Cave in Russia and taken to the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig for genetic analysis, after being identified as a hominin bone due to its protein composition. It is thought that the bone is a fragment of the arm or leg of a young female, who would have been aged around 13 when she died some 90,000 years ago.

“It is striking that we find this Neanderthal/Denisovan child among the handful of ancient individuals whose genomes have been sequenced,” said Prof Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute. “Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have had many opportunities to meet. But when they did, they must have mated frequently – much more so than we previously thought.”

Genetic analysis of the bone indicates that the mother was more closely related to the 55,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the Vindija Cave in western Europe than those of another, the so-called Altai Neanderthal, that lived in the Denisova Cave at an earlier date. This means that Neanderthals must have at some point traveled between western and eastern Europe.

The team also found evidence in the genome that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor further back in his family tree – between 8,000 and 17,000 years before Denny lived.

“An interesting aspect of this genome is that it allows us to learn things about two populations – the Neanderthals from the mother’s side, and the Denisovans from the father’s side,” said Dr. Fabrizio Mafessoni, also from the Max Planck Institute.

A reconstruction of what the Neanderthal-Denisovan Denny might have looked like when she was alive

Expert comment

Rebecca Wragg Sykes – Archaeologist based at the Université de Bordeaux

It’s hard to overstate the importance of finding Denny. A decade ago we had no clue that her father’s people even existed, much less that children like her existed.

In May 2010 the first Neanderthal genome was published, proving that rather than usurping them, early Homo sapiens made babies with them. But just the month before, samples from a tiny finger bone in Denisova Cave, Siberia revealed an entirely new hominin species.

Now known as D3, this bone was at least 10,000 years younger than Denny. Thanks to ancient DNA, today we’ve identified five Denisovans. But we know more about their history as a species than we do about their technology or even their appearance. Some of them had genes for dark hair, skin, and eyes, but how tall they were or what their faces were like are mysteries.

Despite all samples so far coming from one site, they were far from isolated. Both they and Neanderthals bred with H. sapiens, but in different times and places. Asians and Native Americans have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, which might reflect more interaction in that region, or elsewhere in a group which later moved eastwards.

Denisovan blood is even more unevenly distributed: living populations of Oceania and Australia have up to 25 times more than anywhere else. It’s clear we’re seeing only a fraction of the true picture.

Another extinction theory may soon bite the dust

Neanderthals and Denisovans weren’t shy of each other, either. D3’s genes showed interbreeding tens of thousands of years before she died. Denny’s father’s forebears were also making babies with Neanderthals up to 17,000 years earlier. Intriguingly, those far-off encounters were with a Neanderthal lineage different from that of Denny’s mother.

Finding the child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan should make us sit up and think. Until now, most evidence has pointed to small, localized populations in both species. Added to this, studies mapping the distances that stone tools were moved from their source pointed to relatively limited territories.

On this basis, dominant theories emphasized Neanderthals as socially ‘exclusive’: avoiding outsiders, limited to topographic, cultural and genetic valleys. If that’s true, it’s unlikely we would ever find the result of such an encounter, so Denny is telling us something about these models is wrong.

Populations were likely small, so the startling fact of Denny’s parentage means the other part of the equation must be wrong: Denisovans and Neanderthals must have been quite keen on strangers. But how did populations who were happy to blend stay so distinct genetically? One theory is that mixed children had a tougher time reproducing, but we just don’t know yet.

Why does this matter? One of the most influential ideas about why the Neanderthals disappeared is that H. sapiens had more extensive territories – if we map the distances stone tools were carried, early H. sapiens come out ahead. But finding Denny strongly suggests stone tool mobility can’t be a real measure of sociability. Another extinction theory may soon bite the dust.

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Worms Frozen for 42,000 Years in Siberian Permafrost Wriggle to Life

Worms Frozen for 42,000 Years in Siberian Permafrost Wriggle to Life

Sample of Permafrost sediment has been frozen for 42,000 years and has been recently thawed to expose live nematodes.  the roundworms began to move and eat, setting a record for the time an animal can survive cryogenic preservation.

In addition to revealing new limits of endurance, it just might prove useful when it comes to preserving our own tissues. Russian biologists dug up more than 300 samples of frozen soil of different ages and locations throughout the Arctic and took them back to their lab in Moscow for a closer look.

The samples collected from remote parts of northeastern Russia contained nematodes from two different genera, which the researchers placed into Petri dishes with a nutrient medium.

Tiny nematodes like this one were found to be unexpectedly hardy, reviving after thousands of years frozen in Arctic ice

The worms were left for several weeks at a relatively warm 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) as they gradually showed signs of life.

Some of the worms – belonging to the genus Panagrolaimus – were found 30 metres (100 feet) underground in what had once been a ground squirrel burrow which caved in and froze over around 32,000 years ago.

Others from the genus Plectus were found in a bore sample at a depth of around 3.5 metres (about 11.5 feet). Carbon dating was used to determine that sample to be about 42,000 years old.

Contamination can’t be ruled out, but the researchers maintain they adhered to strict sterility procedures.

They aren’t known for burrowing so deep into permafrost, seasonal thawing is limited to around 80 centimetres (under 3 feet), and there’s been no hint of thawing beyond 1.5 metres (5 feet) when the area was at its warmest around 9000 years ago.

So we can be fairly confident these worms really did awaken from one incredibly long nap.

Reviving ancient organisms is itself nothing new. In 2000, scientists pulled spores from Bacillus bacteria hidden inside 250 million-year-old salt crystals and managed to return them to life.

We might be impressed by their fortitude, but we can’t apply bacteria’s life-preserving tricks to our own complicated tissues. So finding animals that can remain dormant for tens of thousands of years is a discovery well worth paying attention to.

Roundworms are known to be hardy creatures. Nematodes have been revived in 39-year-old herbarium samples, but nothing has previously been seen on a scale quite like this.

Close relatives, the tardigrade, are also well known for having a talent for surviving extreme conditions, repairing broken DNA and producing a vitrifying material when they dry out.

Even those superpowered critters have never been seen to survive so long in states of preservation, with the current tardigrade record being only around 30 years. Learning more about the biochemical mechanisms nematodes use to limit the damage of ice and hold off the ravages of oxidation on DNA over the millennia might point the way to better cryopreservation technologies.

We’ve studied other organisms that can handle having their liquids turned to ice for inspiration, such as wood frogs, in the hope of finding better ways to store human tissues for transplants, or even – just maybe – whole bodies for revival.

 “It is obvious that this ability suggests that the Pleistocene nematodes have some adaptive mechanisms that may be of scientific and practical importance for the related fields of science, such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology,” the researchers write in their report.

But the find does have a slightly darker side. There are concerns that the melting of permafrost could release pathogens locked up in deep freeze for tens of thousands of years.

Nematodes are unlikely to pose much of a concern, but their survival is evidence that a diverse array of organisms – from bacteria to animals, plants to fungi – could potentially return after a long absence.

Exactly what this means for surrounding ecosystems is still anybody’s guess. We can only hope a few groggy worms are all we have to worry about in Siberia’s melting ice. This research was published in Doklady Biological Sciences.

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Amazingly preserved 46000-year-old frozen horned lark found in Siberia

Frozen bird discovered in Siberia is 46,000 years old, scientists discover

Researchers in Siberia discovered a frozen bird in the permafrost in 2018.

A frozen bird, pictured, was so well preserved that fossil hunters thought that it had ‘died yesterday’ has turned out to be 46,000 years old, from the middle of the last ice age

Examination of the remains of the bird found that it had lived there more than experts expected. The analysis revealed that the bird is about 46,000 years old and covered by permafrost in Siberia.

An analysis of the DNA found that the bird was a ancestor of two different lark subspecies — one in Mongolia and one in Siberia. It provides unique insight into the ecosystem this lark lived in during the last Ice Age.

The specimen — an ancestor of the modern horned lark, pictured — was found preserved in permafrost in a mine tunnel near the village of Belaya Gora in north-east Siberia
The specimen — an ancestor of the horned lark — was found preserved in permafrost in a mine tunnel near the village of Belaya Gora in north-east Siberia

Scientists from the University of Stockholm and the Swedish Museum of Natural history studied the frozen bird and determined it was a horned lark that roamed the sky of our planet between 44,000 and 49,000 years ago.

“Not only can we identify the bird as a horned lark. The genetic analysis also suggests that the bird belonged to a population that was a joint ancestor of two subspecies of horned lark living today, one in Siberia, and one in the steppe in Mongolia. This helps us understand how the diversity of subspecies evolves,” revealed Nicolas Dussex, a researcher at the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University.

The study of the frozen bird revealed its distinct charcoal-colored feathers, typical of the horned lark. Despite its age, the feathers are in excellent condition.

Such well-preserved animals “allow for studies of morphological traits, as well as the ecology and evolution of a range of extinct and extant animal species,” the researchers revealed.

Experts also explained that the fact that such a miniature and fragile specimen was found nearly intact suggests that mud and dirt were most likely deposited gradually, or that the ground where it once lived was relatively stable.

The discovery of the bird, as well as its age, comes as a big surprise to experts. They say that although frozen remains of large mammals have been discovered many times, the remains of a frozen bird dating back from the late Pleistocene permafrost deposits has never before been found.

The next step for experts is to map the ancient bird’s genome in order to better understand how the species compares to modern subspecies of horned larks.

Speaking to CNN, Love Dalén from the Swedish Museum of Natural History explained that “this finding implies that the climatic changes that took place at the end of the last Ice Age led to the formation of new subspecies.”

A study detailing the discovery has been published in the Journal Communications Biology.

Scientists working in Siberia have also found the preserved remains of other animals such as ancient wolves, woolly mammoths as well as wooly rhinos among other species.

Such discoveries are described by scientists as “priceless treasures,” that allow them to recover DNA and even RNA samples.

Scientists at the Centre for Palaeogenetics have access to abundant samples from similar discoveries from the same site in Siberia. Among the more fascinating is an 18 000-year-old puppy named “Dogor” which is currently being studied in order to determine if it is a wolf or a dog.

Other findings include a 50 000-year-old cave lion cub “Spartak.”