A miner in the Yukon, Canada, managed to find the oldest wolf mummy while destroying a wall of ice sheets in 2016.

One gold miner in the Yukon region, Canada is reported to have made an unexpected discovery. This happened in 2016. Where, a miner named Neil Loveless found the oldest and most complete wolf mummy while destroying the ice sheet wall using a water cannon.

They found that the mummy of the wolf was well preserved and identified it as a female gray wolf. The wolf became part of an ecosystem that went extinct at a time when Northwest Canada was home to mastodons and other megafauna.

Mammals found in the Siberian tundra date back to the Pleistocene epoch, about 2.6 million to 11,700 years. This period is also known as the Ice Age because of the huge ice caps at the poles. However, the discovery of a whole wolf like in the Yukon was unprecedented. Seeing this, Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen commented.

"In Siberia, the discovery of animals in intact form is a common occurrence. But this is not the case in the Yukon, Alaska and other parts of North America," he said in a statement.

According to Meachen, the discovery of this mummy provides information about many things, starting from the age when he died, 7 weeks and to his food problems. Research from this discovery also provides glimpses of the intermission period between ice sheets in Earth's history.

"The discovery of this extraordinary carnivore allows researchers to look at Ice Age ecosystems from a predator's perspective," said McMaster University paleogeneticist Tyler Murchie.

Despite being an iconic part of the wilderness of modern North America, the gray wolf did not evolve in America. These canids first appeared in Eurasia, by crossing the Bering land bridge at the end of the Pleistocene Period 500,000 years ago.

The wolf, named Zhur, belongs to populations that are genetically related to wolves in Alaska and Eurasia. However, the wolves living in the Yukon today have a different genetic signature.