A 46,000-Year-Old Bird Was Found Frozen In Siberia, With Its Feathers And Talons Still Intact

In 2020, archaeologists uncovered the well-preserved remains of a mummified bird from the Siberian permafrost. The bird was from the Ice Age and still had its feathers and talons intact.

The specimen was identified as a horned lark and believed to be the ancestor of two subspecies of horned larks that are alive today in the Mongolian steppe and northern Russia.

“This finding implies that the climactic changes that took place at the end of the last Ice Age led to the formation of new subspecies,” said Love Dalén, an expert in evolutionary genetics from the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

It also marked the first time that a whole bird was excavated from the frozen tundra. It had been frozen since the last Ice Age and had been buried 23 feet beneath the ground inside a Siberian ice tunnel.

The bird was discovered by local fossil ivory hunters near the village of Belaya Gora in northeastern Siberia. They reached out to experts from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who then conducted tests on the specimen.

Radiocarbon dating revealed that the bird was around 46,000 years old. A genetic analysis determined it was a horned lark (Eremophila alpestris). The bird’s remarkable preservation was due to the cold layers of the Siberian permafrost.

Usually, specimens from the Siberian permafrost are well-preserved, but this particular bird was in excellent condition.

“The fact that such a small and fragile specimen was near intact also suggests that dirt or mud must have been deposited gradually, or at least that the ground was relatively stable so that the bird’s carcass was preserved in a state very close to its time of death,” said Nicolas Dussex, a co-author of the study.

After the initial stage of research, the team will work on sequencing the bird’s entire genome. The analysis will help give the researchers a clearer understanding of the bird’s relationship to modern larks and estimate their rate of evolution.

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