If we're ever discovered frozen and buried in Siberian permafrost someday, we can only dream of looking this pristine at the ripe age of 46,000 years old!

While on a 2018hunting expedition searching for fossilized mammoth tusks near the village of Belaya Gora in Siberia, two men stumbled across the rigid, frozen carcass of a small Ice Age bird that once flew the friendly skies nearly 50 millennia ago.The feathered survivor was in remarkably good condition due to it being protected from biologicaldecay and hungry animal scavengers by the region's frigid icygroundcover.

Love Daln, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, was accompanying the pair of ivory hunters, Boris Berezhnov and Spartak Khabrov, when they unearthedthe rare Ice Age remnant, and was shocked to observe its incredibly well-preserved state.

The results of this fortuitous discovery were made public in a new study published in the online journalCommunications Biology, which details the identification and historyof theonly near-intact bird carcass ever documented from thelast ice age.The location of its final resting place was near the banks of the Indigirka River in Siberia, where it shared a home populated with various Pleistocene Epoch creatureslikemajesticmammoths,horses,woolly rhinos,bison, andlynx.

After determining the frozen flier's age to be approximately 46,000 years old using radiocarbon dating techniques with delicate samples offeathers and a tiny piece of tissue, Daln and his colleagues played detective to pinpointthe precise species the bird belonged to. Via DNAsequencing, lead study author andpostdoctoral researcher Nicolas Dussex of Stockholm University pieced together its specific signature of mitochondrial DNA, and matched its lineage to that of afemale horned lark (Eremophila alpestris).

The level of preservation of this bird is absolutely stunning,"Daln tells SYFY WIRE."Considering its age, its possibly one of the best preserved pre-historic specimens ever discovered.

Further research found the bird to be an ancestorof two sub-species of modern horned lark, one residingon the remote Eurasian tundraand the other in Mongolia and surrounding countries, providing new clues to how climate change possibly affected the divergence.

"When the local Russians came and showed the bird, I had had trouble believing that it really could be that old," he recalls. "I thought that perhaps it was a bird that had flown into the tunnel a few years ago and died there. But the locals insisted that it had been found in the permafrost far inside the tunnel. So we decided to collect samples from it for radiocarbon dating, and when we got the results it was clear that it was not only old, but actually [circa] 46,000 years old. So it is several tens of thousands of years older than, for example, the cave lion cubs and wolf head found in the same site."

Read more here:
Believe it or not, this perfectly preserved bird is actually 46,000 years old - SYFY WIRE

Comments are closed.