“In 2011, mammoth ivory hunters in northeastern Siberia discovered a mummified wolf puppy that had lain frozen for 14,400 years. An autopsy of the permafrost-preserved pup revealed another surprise: its gut contained chunks of grayish meat covered with strands of golden hair.

‘The tissue was so intact, it looked like the wolf had just swallowed it before it died,’ says Camilo Chacón-Duque, an evolutionary geneticist who previously worked at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm and is now at Uppsala University in Sweden. 

Ancient DNA retrieved from the wolf cub’s final meal revealed the tissue belonged to a woolly rhinoceros. Chacón-Duque and his team used the devoured morsel to reconstruct the woolly rhino’s entire genome—the first time scientists have sequenced an Ice Age animal’s complete genome from the contents of another animal’s stomach. They published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.”

From National Geographic.