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Where and when was the wolf found?
Local residents discovered the carcass in 2021 in permafrost about 40 metres deep beside the Tirekhtyakh River, in the Abyysky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), northeastern Siberia. It was transferred to the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha for study. The European University at St Petersburg described the specimen as more than 44,000 years old; a 2026 conference abstract gives its age as approximately 44,000 years. The available reports therefore support an approximate age, not a more exact date.
Researchers from the European University, the Academy of Sciences of Yakutia, North-Eastern Federal University and the Institute of Experimental Medicine examined the carcass during a 2024 autopsy at the Mammoth Museum laboratory in Yakutsk. Tooth analysis reported by Live Science indicated that the animal was an adult male. The European University called it an unprecedented find: in the institution’s account, it was the first fully preserved carcass of an adult predator of this geological age. That characterization belongs to the institution and should not be read as a universal inventory of every specimen ever recovered.
What did scientists examine?
At the 2024 autopsy, the team sampled internal organs, gastrointestinal contents and soft tissue. The planned work included investigating diet, gut microbes, ancient viruses, other microbes, parasites and the wolf’s genome, including comparisons with modern wolves. Those were research aims at the time, not completed findings.
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Albert Protopopov, head of the Academy of Sciences of Yakutia’s mammoth-fauna department, described the stomach as isolated and without contaminants, while noting the difficulty of the work. That is a researcher’s description of the stomach and does not establish that every sample was contamination-free.
Artem Nedoluzhko, scientific director of the European University’s Laboratory of Paleogenomics, said the gastrointestinal contents could potentially be examined for ancient human DNA. This was a possibility the researchers hoped to investigate, not a report that human DNA had been found.
What have the genetic analyses found so far?
A 2026 BelBi conference abstract reports that researchers extracted DNA from the wolf’s hair, skin and gastrointestinal contents and carried out sequencing and computational analyses. The team reconstructed a complete mitochondrial genome measuring 16,727 base pairs, with mean coverage of 195×.
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The abstract’s phylogenetic analysis places the animal in a strongly supported clade of northeastern Siberian Pleistocene wolves dated to 41,000–67,000 years ago. It reports no direct descendants of this clade among modern wolf populations. This is a result about the Tirekhtyakh specimen as presented in the conference abstract; it is not a finding from a separate, peer-reviewed 2021 study of other Pleistocene Siberian wolf specimens.
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The 2026 abstract reports 15 metagenome-assembled genomes from the gastrointestinal contents, including a high-quality genome assigned to Erysipelothrix. The abstract gives that genome’s completeness as 91.4% and contamination as 1.2%. It also describes genes associated with virulence and antimicrobial resistance, and preliminary taxonomic profiling that found diverse eukaryotic taxa that may help researchers interpret the wolf’s diet.
The authors interpret the results as evidence that relevant bacterial traits and antimicrobial-resistance determinants existed more than 40,000 years ago. These are preliminary conference-abstract claims. Finding a bacterial genome or genes associated with virulence does not, by itself, show that the wolf had an active infection. The reported taxa may inform dietary interpretation, but the abstract does not identify a definitive last meal or establish exactly what the animal ate.
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How certain are the conclusions?
The evidence has different levels of maturity. The carcass’s recovery location, the 2024 autopsy and the sampled tissues are reported observations. The genome measurements and gut-genome results are preliminary findings from a 2026 conference abstract, not a full peer-reviewed paper validating every interpretation. In particular, the available reports do not establish the wolf’s cause of death, its precise meal, or final conclusions about its microbiome and health.
A peer-reviewed 2021 study, “Genomes of Pleistocene Siberian Wolves Uncover Multiple Extinct Wolf Lineages”, provides broader context for ancient wolf diversity. It analyzed other specimens, so it should not be treated as direct evidence of this individual’s ancestry.
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