"Roughly 14,400 years ago in what is now Russia, a wolf pup feasted on the meat of a woolly rhinoceros ( Coelodonta antiquitatis) that probably belonged to one of the last populations of the species. A genomic analysis of the woolly rhino tissue found inside the stomach of an ice age wolf ( Canis lupis) revealed that woolly rhino's extinction occurred rapidly soon after."
"Finding one of the last members of a species is very rare, says molecular ecologist Morten Allentoft at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. "You actually have access and direct insights into the gene pool of a species just as it's disappearing," he adds. Nic Rawlence, a palaeoecologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, says that it is even more amazing that the team could generate a genome from the sample."
"Dalén says that the sample was discovered during an autopsy of the puppy, and he and his colleagues received the sample because researchers initially thought that it belonged to a cave lion ( Panthera spelaea), a species they were studying. But when they extracted DNA to map against a cave lion reference genome, it was not a match, instead belonging to a woolly rhino."
Roughly 14,400 years ago in present-day Russia, a wolf pup consumed the meat of a woolly rhinoceros that likely belonged to one of the species' last populations. Radiocarbon dating of the rhino tissue recovered from the wolf's stomach returned an age of 14,400 years, placing it among the youngest known woolly rhinos. Genomic analysis of that tissue indicates a rapid population collapse and extinction soon after. A warming climate is implicated as a plausible cause of the collapse. Generating a genome from stomach-preserved tissue provided rare, direct genetic insight into the species' final gene pool.
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