YAKUTSK, October 9. /TASS/. Scientists of the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) during an expedition to Yakutia's Verkhoyansky District discovered skulls and bones of ancient animals - a fox, a wolf, a brown bear and a cave lion, the University's Mammoth Museum's head of the laboratory Maxim Cheprasov told TASS.
In July, the university scientists worked in Yakutia's Verkhoyansky District to study the area where a year earlier was found an incomplete carcass of an ancient bison. Scientists hoped to find other remains of ancient animals there.
"The mammoth fauna's location is in a remote area in the Adycha River upper reaches. We had to use at first a motor boat, and then a swamp vehicle, and we crossed the most difficult part on horseback. We have surveyed the area where the bison was found, collected samples, and described the bone material. We have made a good collection of carnivores - skulls and skeletal bones of fossils of fox, wolf, brown bear and cave lion," the expert said.
During the autopsy of an ancient bison in March, scientists at the university sampled soft tissues, muscles, skin, and fur and extracted the brain. According to preliminary results, that was a young animal 1.5-2 years old. Further results will give information about the geological and biological age, about the specific structures of the skull and skeleton bones, as well as about the ecological situation in the studied bison's habitat.
Expedition to Kolyma River lower reaches
Additionally, in early August, the scientists traveled to the Kolyma River basin. "The main task was to explore a new promising location of mammoth fauna in the Kolyma lower reaches. Before the trip, the Mammoth Museum received unique finds from that location. They, for example, include a fossil hare, mouse-like rodents," the scientist said.
In the recent expedition, scientists have collected no less valuable material, he continued. "There was a whole carcass of a mouse-like rodent, cadaverous remains of hares, and mammoth excrement. We have sorted out the bone remains of carnivores, ungulates, and of a mammoth that were of interest to us," he said.
"Until recently, the findings of mouse-like rodents and hares were extremely rare. As scientific collections were receiving bone and cadaveric remains of representatives of these groups, scientists focused on their studies to determine morphological features and genetic links with modern forms. To identify the genetic connections of modern and ancient hares that lived on the territory of modern Yakutia, we have studied five fossil hares, four of which are in the Mammoth Museum collection," he told TASS.
The paleo-climatic changes during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene caused the extinction of most mammoth fauna representatives, including the Don hare, which inhabited Eurasia in the Pleistocene, he added.
"For quite a long time scientists believed that the modern white hares are a separate species. During the research, we confirmed the phylogenetic proximity of hares up to 30,000 years old, the Don hare and the white hare. At the same time, samples older than 40,000 years form a completely separate mitochondrial clade (a group of organisms containing a common ancestor and their all direct descendants - TASS) of the extinct hare," the scientist concluded.