ABOUT 14,400 years ago, a weeks-old wolf puppy ate its last meal — meat from a woolly rhinoceros — shortly before dying on the harsh Ice Age landscape of northeastern Siberia.
In a first, researchers have extracted DNA and recovered the rhino’s genome from a chunk of undigested meat from the stomach contents found in the puppy’s remains, discovered in permafrost near the village of Tumat. These genome findings provided insight into the fate of this impressive cold-adapted horned herbivore species once common in northern Europe and Asia.
The researchers compared this rhino’s genome to those of two other individuals from the same species that lived thousands of years earlier — about 18,000 and 49,000 years ago — to examine genetic changes over time. In doing so, they learned that the woolly rhinoceros as a species remained genetically healthy until the end of the Ice Age before apparently suffering a rapid population collapse, probably because the warming climate erased their preferred steppe-tundra environment.
For instance, the newly recovered genome showed no evidence of inbreeding suggestive of population decline. Other research has indicated that the woolly rhinoceros disappeared about 14,000 years ago, just a few hundred years after this individual lived.
“With this research we demonstrate that it is possible to recover a high-quality genome from poorly preserved material dating to a crucial time in the life history of a species,” said evolutionary geneticist Solveig Gudjonsdottir, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
“It is a very cool achievement,” said evolutionary geneticist and study co-senior author Love Daln of the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The woolly rhinoceros, whose species name is Coelodonta antiquitatis, first appears in the fossil record about 600,000 years ago.
It became one of the many large mammals to go extinct around the end of the last Ice Age, along with such species as woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons and giant ground sloths, all of which faced ominous environmental changes as the climate warmed, as well as pressure from human hunting.
“The woolly rhinoceros was a large animal, reaching up to around 2 meters (7 feet) tall, and was covered in thick, long fur,” said Gudjonsdottir, who worked on the study while a master’s student at Stockholm University. “It had two horns, a large hump on its back, a stocky build and relatively short legs. The species was primarily a grazer, feeding on grass and low vegetation adapted to cold, dry environments,” Gudjonsdottir added.
Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2026
