Fossil hunters in Siberia have discovered a 46,000-year-old bird preserved so well by the ice they initially mistook it for a creature that had died the day before.
The “icebird”, the first bird ever found from the Ice Age, has been identified as a female horned lark that lived among woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, and cave lions.
Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, found the creature on an expedition with local fossil ivory hunters inside an ice tunnel in Siberia.
He said the creature looked like it had “died yesterday”, and was probably so well-preserved because it must have frozen “relatively quickly” without a chance to decompose.
Dr Nicolas Dussex, lead author on the paper about the bird – an ancestor of modern subspecies of horned lark in Russia and Mongolia – said: “It feels crazy to be working on the first-ever discovered frozen bird from the last Ice Age…
“The exciting thing is we could get enough DNA out of this very old specimen to do much more interesting analyses.”
The discovery “opens up a new window” that allows researchers to go back further in time than was thought possible, he said. “It kind of feels surreal to be working on it because we’ve been working in our lab with things that are a few thousand or hundred years old,” Dr Dussex said.
“You tend to think the limit is around maybe ten to 15 thousand years old and then beyond that it gets really hard to get authentic data.”
He said getting the bird’s genome could improve understanding about evolution or the impact of climate change during that period.
“What is going to be the next bird we’re going to find? Could we find an eagle or something that is extinct that we didn’t know existed?” he added.
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