Jesse Rogerson

This is where this wolf cub was found.

Yeah.

You know, you're, you know, things like the flesh of an animal is going to degrade over time.

And certainly the DNA is going to degrade really fast.

DNA does not last long through through like fossilization.

So the fact that it was so well-preserved, and you should see the wolf cub.

It's amazing.

It looks like a very recent animal.

So they're able to take the DNA out of the flesh from the stomach of the wolf cub, identify it as the woolly rhino, and then they ask the question, what can we tell from this DNA?

And they were able to look at the genetic diversity of the DNA,

Because, so the question is, if this animal, the woolly rhino, was like slowly losing population over many thousands of years, like slowly degrading, slowly becoming extinct, you would be able to see in the DNA that there was less genetic diversity happening.

Exactly, right?

And so you'd be able to tell that.

What they found is that they did this for the wolf cub DNA of the woolly rhino, and then they compared it to a couple of other samples they have from further back in the woolly rhino history, 18,000 years, 40,000 years, 50,000 years.

and found no major changes in genetic diversity, indicating that there was no slow decline.

They had an abrupt extinction around the 14,000-year mark.

Great hypothesis and an abrupt extinction likely points to something environmental.

And at that time, 14,000 years ago, there was environmental things happening.

Climate change was happening in a different way than it is happening today.

There was large shifts in global temperatures.