• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Frozen Fur Ball Turns Out To Be 30,000-Year-Old Ice Age Squirrel

March 31, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Don’t be mistaken by this unassuming fur ball – it’s actually the curled-up mummified remains of a 30,000-year-old Arctic ground squirrel. Look closely and you’ll see it’s in such remarkable condition that it’s possible to make out its tiny claws. 

The discovery was recently revealed by the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre. They explained that it was found in the frosty depths of Canada’s Yukon near Hester Creek in the Klondike Gold Fields, Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Traditional Territory.

Advertisement

“It’s amazing to think that this little guy was running around the Yukon several thousand years ago,” Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre said in a social media post.

With the help of the Alpine Veterinary Medical Centre, the squirrel underwent an X-ray which revealed its skeleton remains incredibly intact, albeit a little bit bunched up. The team added that the specimen will soon go on display at the Beringia Centre for the public to view.

X ray of An Arctic ground squirrel fresh from the Ice Age.

X-rays showed the lil guy was curled up, perhaps hibernating. Image credit: Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre

“It’s not quite recognizable until you see these little hands and these claws, and you see a little tail, and then you see ears,” Grant Zazula, a palaeontologist for the Yukon government, told CBC.

“I study bones all the time and they’re exciting, they’re really neat. But when you see an animal that’s perfectly preserved, that’s 30,000 years old, and you can see its face and its skin and its hair and all that, it’s just so visceral. It brings it so to life,” he continued. 

Advertisement

Despite 30,000 years of time passing, it stayed in such good condition as it had been locked in permafrost, perfectly preserving its tissue like a prehistoric refrigerator.

Its curled-up position suggests it died in its sleep. Perhaps this poor fella was settling down to hibernate for the winter in its burrow, but became snowed under and perished. 

Yukon in Canada is rich in the remains of prehistoric beasts that have been frozen in time since the Ice Age. Just last year, miners in the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Traditional Territory dug up a baby mammoth so well preserved that much of its fur and skin is still intact.

In 2020, a tiny 57,000-year-old mummified wolf puppy was also recovered from the area. It was in such good condition it still had its soft tissues intact and was bearing its teeth as if it was letting out a snarl. 

Advertisement

This part of the world was home to a diverse array of animals during the Ice Age, from wild horses and woolly mammoths to Beringian lions and giant short-faced bears. Thanks to the collection of frozen characters that have been recovered, we have a relatively good understanding of this unique and wonderful ecosystem.

In other permafrost-preservation news, scientists in Russia have recently been studying the remains of an 8,000-year-old bison found in the Siberian permafrost last year. Its condition is so immaculate that some of the team think it could be possible to use the DNA to clone the specimen. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Top human rights lawyer leaves Russia, citing criminal case against him
  2. Amazon starts probe over bribe to gov’t officials by its lawyers in India, report says
  3. Iran’s foreign minister says we were not first to cut ties with Saudi
  4. When You Look At Mars And A Giant Bear Stares Back

Source Link: Frozen Fur Ball Turns Out To Be 30,000-Year-Old Ice Age Squirrel

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Adidas Jabulani: The World Cup Football So Bad NASA Decided To Study It
  • Beluga Whales Shake Their Blob-Like Melons To Say Hello And Even Woo A Mate, But How?
  • Gravitational Wave Detected From Largest Black Hole Merger Yet: “It Presents A Real Challenge To Our Understanding Of Black Hole Formation”
  • At Over 100 Years Of Age, The World’s Oldest Elephant Passes Away In India
  • Ancient Human DNA Reveals Earliest Zoonotic Diseases Appeared 6,500 Years Ago
  • Boys Are Better At Math? That Could Be Because School Favors Them Over Girls
  • Looptail G: Most People Can’t Recognize A Letter You Have Seen Millions Of Times
  • 24-Million-Year-Old Protein Fragments Are Oldest Ever Recovered, A Robot Listened To Spoken Instructions And Performed Surgery, And Much More This Week
  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version