Wolf pup’s stomach yields DNA from one of world’s last surviving woolly rhinos

Roughly 14,400 years ago in what is now Russia, a wolf pup feasted on the meat of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) that probably belonged to one of the last populations of the species. A genomic analysis¹ of the woolly rhino tissue found inside the stomach of an ice age wolf (Canis lupis) revealed that woolly rhino’s extinction occurred rapidly soon after.

The analysis suggests that the woolly rhino, which lived in northern Europe and Asia, went extinct because of a swift population collapse that might have been caused by a warming climate. The findings were published on 14 January in Genome Biology and Evolution.

Finding one of the last members of a species is very rare, says molecular ecologist Morten Allentoft at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “You actually have access and direct insights into the gene pool of a species just as it’s disappearing,” he adds.

Nic Rawlence, a palaeoecologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, says that it is even more amazing that the team could generate a genome from the sample. “The study adds another important time point in the evolutionary story of woolly rhino,” he says.

Mistaken identity

Radiocarbon dating of the youngest known woolly rhino samples suggests that the species went extinct about 14,000 years ago². Love Dalén, an evolutionary genomics researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, and his team radiocarbon-dated the woolly rhino tissue to 14,400 years ago, making it one of the last known members of the species.

Dalén says that the sample was discovered during an autopsy of the puppy, and he and his colleagues received the sample because researchers initially thought that it belonged to a cave lion (Panthera spelaea), a species they were studying. But when they extracted DNA to map against a cave lion reference genome, it was not a match, instead belonging to a woolly rhino.