General Discussion

Demovictory9

(32,421 posts) Sat Nov 30, 2019, 02:40 PM Nov 2019

Ice preserved a tiny puppy in near-perfect condition for 18,000 years. Scientists are fascinated.

Researchers have big outstanding questions about the puppy they have named Dogor — “friend” in a language of the Siberian area where the creature spent 18,000 years in permafrost.

They’re still trying to figure out if the tiny animal is a dog or wolf. They wonder whether he could be part of the evolutionary bridge that turned a fierce wild animal into man’s best friend.

They don’t have to speculate about what Dogor looked like, however, because icy conditions have left him remarkably frozen in time. Scientists can touch his fur, lift his padded paws and pull back his lips to bare small, yellowed teeth.

“Fantastic, right?” says Dave Stanton, a research fellow at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm who has been scrutinizing the long-lost canine. “We have quite a lot of ancient samples. … But this has got be one of the best-preserved.”

The puppy was discovered last year by locals in Yakutia, said Sergey Fedorov, who heads the exposition hall at the Mammoth Museum of Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University. Dogor left the wilderness as a lump of soil and ice, but scientists could make out the head and paws of what they believed at first to be a young wolf.

This puppy was frozen for 12,400 years, and its body is nearly intact — fur and all

Federov told The Washington Post that he carefully cleaned off dirt and debris to reveal near-intact fur — “extremely rare for animals of that time period.”

“It’s an amazing feeling, to see, touch and feel the history of earth,” he saihttps://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/29/ice-preserved-tiny-puppy-near-perfect-condition-years-scientists-are-fascinated/