This is the world's first discovery of a late Pleistocene predator, said Albert Protopopov, head of the department for the study of mammoth fauna at the Yakutia Academy of Sciences. Its age is about 44,000 years, and there have never been such finds before, he said.
Usually, it's the herbivorous animals that die, get stuck in swamps, freeze and reach us as a whole. This is the first time when a large carnivore has been found, said Protopopov.
While it's not unusual to find millennia-old animal carcasses buried deep in permafrost, which is slowly melting due to climate change, the wolf is special, Protopopov said. It was a very active predator, one of the larger ones.
For Artyom Nedoluzhko, development director of the paleogenetics laboratory at the European University at Saint Petersburg, the wolf's remains offer a rare insight into the Yakutia of 44,000 years.
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