“Dogor” an 18,000 year-old puppy that was discovered in the Siberian permafrost. He’s so well preserved that his nose and whiskers are still mostly intact.
Locals found the remains in the summer of 2018 in a frozen lump of ground near the Indigirka River, according to the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. Parts of the animal are incredibly well-preserved, including its head, nose, whiskers, eyelashes and mouth, revealing that it still had its milk teeth when it died. Researchers suggest the animal was just two months old when it passed, though they do not know the cause of death.
The pup is so well-preserved that researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden were able to sequence the animal’s DNA using a piece of rib bone. The results found that Dogor was male, but even after two rounds of analysis the team could not determine whether he was a dog or a wolf.
Further analysis places the pup’s origins in a period of time where dogs’ lineages are thought to have split from their wolf progenitors some 20,000 – 40,000 years ago, putting Dogor right in the middle of the transitioning pack. Before researchers discovered Dogor in the summer of 2018, the oldest known fossil of a domesticated dog dated to 14,700 years ago.
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