Today, the landscape of Dawson City, Yukon—a northwestern Canadian territory famed for its role in the late 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush—is dominated by heavy forest cover, but some 50,000 years ago, the region was a freezing tundra with no trees. Long-extinct animals, including woolly mammoths and western camels, roamed the area alongside mammals whose distant descendants still populate Arctic territories today, navigating the arid climate with mixed success.
Now, two of these Ice Age creatures—a caribou calf and a wolf pup—have emerged from the Yukon permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, thousands of years after their deaths with their fur, skin and muscles almost completely intact.
Read Full Article »
