Perfectly Preserved 18,000-Year-Old ‘Puppy’ With Whiskers Found in the Siberian Permafrost

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As the fantastic movie “Frozen 2” hits the screen, a real creature that comes from deep beneath the Siberian permafrost has scientists even more bewitched and befuddled than movie audiences.

The discovery of a remarkably intact 18,000-year-old puppy northeast of Yakutsk, deep in the heart of Eastern Siberia, might just shed light on the ancient question of the divergent evolution of wolves and dogs.

Found near the Indigirka River, the puppy was found incredibly well preserved under the layers of ice. In addition to its coat being completely intact, it even had whiskers and two rows of perfect teeth.

When paleogenetics in the field examined the small specimen, they determined that it probably died quite young, maybe just at 2 months, before being frozen under the ice. While its age seemed fairly straightforward to determine, its kind proved much more difficult to pin down.

David Stanton, a researcher at the Center for Paleogenetics based in Stockholm, Sweden, who has been involved with the analysis of the puppy, was stumped by the difficulty of identifying the puppy as a dog or wolf. “It’s normally relatively easy to tell the difference between the two,” Stanton told CNN.

Given the amount of data scientists have, from DNA samples to radiocarbon dating of a rib bone, it should have already become clear. “The fact that we can’t might suggest that it’s from a population that was ancestral to both—to dogs and wolves,” Stanton said.

Love Dalén, another researcher at the Center for Paleogenetics, noted that the issue isn’t a lack of records for historical comparison. “The Centre has the Europe’s largest DNA bank of all canines from around the globe, yet in this case they couldn’t identify it from the first try,” he told the Siberian Times.

As Stanton pointed out to CNN, there’s still a great deal that scientists don’t know about as per how dogs came to be a species separate from wolves. “We don’t know exactly when dogs were domesticated, but it may have been from about that time [when the puppy died],” Stanton explained. “We are interested in whether it is in fact a dog or a wolf, or perhaps it’s something halfway between the two.”

Dalén tweeted that the puppy had 43 percent endogenous DNA, suggesting that it might be something altogether different. As he noted, if the pup was shown to be a dog, it would be the oldest one in history.

Local Russian researcher Sergey Fedorov from Institute of Applied Ecology of the North took the incredible pictures of the puppy and was equally baffled by its unidentifiable status. “We can’t wait to get results from further tests,” he told the Siberian Times. Working with his colleague in Sweden, he helped come up with a name for the puppy.

After genetic analyses established that it was a male, Feodorov helped come up with the name “dogor,” which in the local Yakutian language means “friend.” Of course, for English speakers, it calls to mind the indeterminate nature of the creature. Dog or wolf?

According to the best scientific estimates, the domestication of dogs took place at some point around 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. In 2016, researchers in Siberia found another ancient puppy in the permafrost, also with preserved teeth, that was estimated to have lived and died 12,400 years in the past.

What was particularly unique was that this puppy’s brain was intact. Dr. Pavel Nikolsky, from the Geological Institute in Moscow, told the Siberian Times that “it has dried out somewhat, but the both parencephalon, cerebellum and pituitary gland are visible.” He added, “We can say that this is the first time we have obtained the brain of a Pleistocene canid.”