Or woolly rhinoceros, by Benjamin Langlois
Digested meat from an ancient wolf cub’s last meal, which took place a staggering 14,400 years ago, contained enough woolly rhino DNA to sequence its entire genome.
More than 14 millennia later, the last meal of a siberian wolf cub made a significant contribution to science and to our understanding of the now extinct woolly-rhinoceros.
For the first time, researchers were able to sequence a complete genome of an animal of the Ice Age thanks to what was found in the stomach of another animal.
More than a decade ago, a pair of Siberian wolf pups were taken from , near the village of Tumat in northeast Siberia. One of the cubs had its last meal still preserved in the stomach: a piece of meat from the now extinct woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta of antiquity).
Radiocarbon dating placed the calf’s last meal at 14,400 yearsnearly 400 years before extinction of the woolly rhinoceros, an animal that was similar in size to the white rhino modern.
The woolly rhinoceros was a cold-adapted herbivore with a robust coat that allowed it to better survive the harsh temperatures, although it was still often prey of a hungry wolf cubor, more likely, a whole pack of hungry wolves).
In a new one, published last week in Genome Biology and Evolutionscientists explain how they sequenced the woolly rhino genome, based on muscle tissues found inside the wolf, one of the youngest specimens of the animal ever discovered.
“Sequencing the complete genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal had never been done before“, explains the main author of the study, Camilo Chacon-Duquein a statement published on .
“Recovering genomes from individuals who lived even before extinction is challenging, but can provide important clues about what caused the species to disappear — which may also be relevant for the conservation of endangered species today“, adds Chacon-Duque.
The team compared genetic diversity, consanguinitygenetic load and changes in population size in the new sample with two other Siberian woolly rhinos from the Late Pleistocene, one sample from around 18,000 years ago and another from approximately 49,000 years ago.
“It was really excitingbut also very challenging, extracting a complete genome from such an unusual sample”, says Sólveig Guðjónsdóttirfirst author of the study, who worked on the project while doing her master’s thesis at Stockholm University.
“Our analyzes showed a genetic pattern surprisingly stable, sin changes in consanguinity levels over tens of thousands of years before the extinction of woolly rhinos,” he says Edna Lordresearcher at the Paleogenetics Center at Stockholm University and co-author of the study.
The results suggest that woolly rhinos had a viable population for 15,000 years after what is thought to be the time when the first humans arrived in northeastern Siberia, suggesting that climate warmingnot human hunting, caused extinction, according to the study authors.
“We found no evidence of decline in population size, nor any genomic erosion, shortly before the species’ disappearance,” the study authors wrote.
“Given the few long homozygous segments, typically indicative of recent inbreeding, we infer a stable population size just a few hundred years before extinction,” they add.
The study authors concluded that the extinction of the woolly rhino was likely happened quickly — and that the wolves probably didn’t help either.
