In Siberian Permafrost, A Perfectly Preserved 32,000-Year-Old Wolf Head Was Discovered

The discovery, which was initially published by the Siberian Times, was expected to aid experts in understanding how steppe wolves differed from modern wolves and why the species eventually became extinct.

The wolf in issue was fully grown, perhaps between the ages of 2 and 4, according to Marisa Iati of the Washington Post. Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, was filming a documentary in Siberia when the tusk hunter arrived on the scene with the severed head in tow. She says that media reports touting the find as a "giant wolf" are false, despite photographs of the severed head measuring 15.7 inches long and showing clumps of fur, fangs, and a well-preserved snout.

“If you disregard the frozen clump of permafrost adhered to where the neck would [usually] have been”, Dalén told Smithsonian magazine that “the animal was not significantly larger than a current wolf.”

In order to create a digital model of the animal's brain and the interior of its skull, a Russian team led by Albert Protopopov of the Republic of Sakha's Academy of Sciences was working on the project, according to CNN.

Given the head's level of preservation, David Stanton, a scientist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History who was conducting the genetic investigation of the remains, told Smithsonian that he and his team were optimistic that they could extract viable DNA and use it to decode the wolf's genome.

It is now unknown precisely how the wolf's head came to be detached from the rest of its body. In an interview with Smithsonian, evolutionary biologist Tori Herridge of the Natural History Museum in London said that Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan believes that scans of the animal's head may reveal evidence of its deliberate severance by humans, possibly "contemporaneously with the wolf dying." Herridge points out that if this is the case, the discovery would provide "a unique example of human interaction with carnivores." Yet she ends her Twitter post by saying, "I am reserving judgment until more investigation [is] done."

Herridge was hesitant, and Dalén repeated him, claiming that he had "seen no evidence convincing" him that people chopped off their heads. After all, fragmentary sets of bones are frequently discovered in the Siberian permafrost. For instance, if an animal was only partially buried and then frozen, the remainder of its body might have rotted or been consumed by scavengers. Alternately, it's likely that the corpse split into several pieces due to changes in the permafrost over thousands of years.