Ice age wolf pup and caribou dug up in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Ice age wolf pup and caribou dug up in Canada

amp.theguardian.com

105 pointsboulos14 comments

What a beautiful discovery!

For context, 50k years ago was the early phase of a North-African pluvial period when the Sahara was a wet and fertile region; this lasted 20k years. The Neanderthals disappeared 40k years ago. The first evidence of the domestication of dogs dates to around 35k years ago in Europe and Siberia.

For the Northern Europeans here, reindeer and caribou are actually the same species, Rangifer tarandus, but with substantial differences: caribou are large, wild, elk-like animals which can be found in northern North America and Greenland and have never been domesticated. In my experience the meat tastes the same.

A tip to everyone that likes natural history: the Royal Tyrrel Museum in Drumheller, Alberta (one hour drive North East of Calgary), Canada is probably the finest natural history museum in the world. Their collections of Jurassic/Cretaceous dinosaurs and fossils from the Cambrian Revolution from the Burgess Shale are mesmerizing.

[1] http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/

My grandmother always promised to take me there when I was a kid. She's passed now, but I'd still like to get out there. Sadly never made it that far east. (I had to get to the mountains instead :P)

The surrounding badlands are supposed to be quite the sight as well.

https://abprairies.com/30-thickbox_default/majestic-badlands...

The wolf pup looks so much like a modern dog, it could almost pass for a golden retriever.

It is often the case that domesticated animals (including humans vs their common ancestor's descendants) look like "eternally infantile" versions of wild creatures. I think there is a name for this phenomenon, but I cannot find it. Does anyone know?

Neoteny, I believe.

You are probably thinking of "neoteny":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny

Except that the current colour (correct spelling as it is canadian) is the result of oxidation. It was probably a more wolf-like grey or black.

They were found in 2016. How come this wasn't announced earlier? It seems like no research about the bodies was done between 2016 and today.

I had the same question, and was hoping someone from the field might comment. It seems unlikely it took two years to extract, but perhaps there’s a long lag between taking a specimen from the ground and being able to certify its veracity?

A ha, maybe the CBC version [1] makes it clearer:

> According to the Yukon government, the miners promptly reported their finds to researchers, for study and preservation.

> Both specimens have been accepted by the Canadian Conservation Institute because of their scientific value.

> The mummified animals are now on display at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre in Dawson City, where they'll stay for the rest of the month.

So probably a lot of the science has been collected, then they prepped it for preservation and display.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/mummified-wolf-pup-cari...

This seems to be a common feature in "found" things in the natural sciences—the actual discovery is years before the publication of the associated journal article or conference proceedings. Until the peer review is done, the scientists are understandably reticent (well, with some notable exceptions) to crow about the discovery. It doesn't say in the article (tsk tsk, Guardian) but I'm betting that the "news" in this is actually a scientific publication about the find.

In some cases, they probably don't want to talk about a recent discovery because then there'll be a bunch of people looking for more mummified remains. The researchers might want to have a nice long look around before attracting a crowd of tourists.

Likely wanted to confirm and peer review the results before publishing any details

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