A mummified Pleistocene gray wolf pup

In July 2016, a mummified carcass of an ancient wolf (Canis lupus) pup (specimen YG 648.1) was discovered in thawing permafrost in the Klondike goldfields, near Dawson City, Yukon, Canada (Figure 1A). The wolf pup mummy was recovered along a small tributary of Last Chance Creek during hydraulic thawing that exposed the permafrost sediment in which it was preserved. This mummified wolf pup is important to the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people, who named it Zhùr, meaning ‘wolf’ in the Hän language of their community. Here, we report detailed morphometric, isotopic, and genetic analyses of Zhùr that reveal details of her appearance, evolutionary relationships to other wolves and short life-history and ecology. Zhùr is the most complete wolf mummy known. She lived approximately 57,000 years ago and died in her den during a collapse of the sediments. During her short life, she ate aquatic resources, and is related to ancient Beringian and Russian gray wolves and her clade is basal to all living gray wolves.