18,000-year-old specimen found frozen in time in 'Pole of Cold'

In the coldest inhabitable place on earth, researchers discovered a 'friend' who could possibly give them a glimpse into the past.

In the subzero climate of Yakutsk, Russia, scientists uncovered a chunk of earth and ice with what they believed to be parts of a young animal.

Sergey Fedorov, head of the exposition hall at the Mammoth Museum of Russia's North-Eastern Federal University, told the Washington Post that when he carefully cleaned off the dirt, he found near-intact fur beneath.

Locals had found the remains in 2018, the same year mammoth tusk hunters unearthed a 42,000-year-old carcass of a foal from the Batagaika crater, also an area of Siberia. The foal was believed to be the best-preserved Ice Age animal ever found.

This time, a puppy emerged from the permafrost, more or less intact from the pads of his paws to the tips of his eyelashes after spending 18,000 years frozen.

"Fantastic, right?" Dave Stanton, a research fellow at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, told the Star Tribune. "We have quite a lot of ancient samples... But this has got to be one of the best-preserved."

The fact that the animal still had near-intact fur was "extremely rare for animals of that time period," Fedorov had told the Washington Post.

After genome analysis showed that the puppy was male, the researchers landed on the name "Dogor," which is the Yukutian word for "friend."

The perfect environment for preservation

The environment Dogor had been discovered in is one of the most extreme in the world.

"The Siberian 'Pole of Cold' is located within the Sakha Republic, or Yakutia, in northeastern Asia," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Jim Andrews said. "In winter, it is the coldest inhabited area on earth -- only the tops of the great Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets are colder."

Temperatures below minus 60 degrees F are not unusual in the heart of the Pole of Cold, Andrews said.

"Amazingly, a number of mammal species are adapted to survive this incredible cold. However, their lives are certainly 'on the edge,' and any winter mishap can quickly lead to death," Andrews said. "At temperatures often minus 50 to minus 60 F, any incapacitated animal can quickly freeze. A small animal such as a puppy may easily freeze solid within an hour."

This would point toward how Dogor was protected from decomposing, but it doesn't fully explain how he was bypassed by scavengers.

"An alternate scenario could have the puppy getting into a quagmire during the ever-so-fleeting summer thaw," Andrews said. "Partially thawed permafrost can be a thick liquid that flows, engulfing unlucky animals and anything else it contacts. Such a quagmire offers one explanation of why we can look at the preserved remains of an 18,000-year-old puppy today!"

Permafrost refers to ground that stays at or below freezing year round, and can range from patches of ground merely a foot thick to thousands of feet deep. Assuming the onset of the Pleistocene ice ages were not much warmer than our present interglacial period, there could be permafrost that is greater than 100,000, even 1,000,000, years old, Andrews said.

For permafrost to melt, it requires the climate to warm. A longer warming period makes for a larger area of permafrost to thaw. Still, there are some of the thinner areas that can thaw out within the timespan of a few summers.

What scientists haven't been able to clearly observe from the preserved remains, however, was if Dogor was a wolf, a dog, or a species that connected the two. After testing a rib bone, they found that Dogor had died around a time when wolf lineages were declining and dogs theorized to have begun to emerge. He had been two months old.

"As you go back in time, as you get closer to the point that dogs and wolves converge, it becomes harder to tell between the two," Stanton told the Star Tribune.

The oldest known domesticated dog skulls were found in Siberia and Belgium, dating back to 33,000 years ago.

Report a Typo