Old Crow north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon is not your typical diminished town . Here , temperatures reach a bone - chill -36 ° C ( -23.8 ° atomic number 9 ) in wintertime and fossil literally gnaw from the bluffs and plonk near river banks .
The fossil come from all variety of iconic Ice Age beasts : woolly mammoths , steppe bison , horses , and lion . Others total from not - so - distinctive brute : flat - headed pecary , large - bodied camel , and now hyenas .
Paleontologists have confirmed the first know fossils of running hyena ( Chasmaporthetes ) in the Arctic using two teeth dated between 1.4 million and 850,000 years one-time .
" To me , it is absolutely remarkable that they lived that far magnetic north , " said study co - writer Grant Zazula , Government of Yukon Paleontologist , to IFLScience .
The teeth were discover in the low Old Crow River – a distant area only approachable by boarding a plane to the local village , then traveling downriver by way of the river or by whirlybird . The fossils belong to toC. ossifragus , a specialised bone - crack hunting watch - scavenger that " may have predate on unseasoned mammoths , caribou , and horse , " said Zazula .
" At this meter , gargantuan camel ( Paracamelus ) would have been one of the other large , common herbivore these hyaena would have run into and predate on or salvage . "
Theregion , although super cold , was never continue in glaciers because it was too wry . The Chasmaporthetes likely live open flat coat and hunted with slender , cheetah - like arm and razor - sharp teeth .
" These hyena had to endure several months in the winter of near ended darkness , and incredibly frigid status . Most clime reconstructions for the Ice Age indicate it was on modal around 6 ° deoxycytidine monophosphate colder than it is at present , " said Zazula , whose research is published inOpen Quaternary .
Researchers antecedently suspected that hyena may have lived in Alaska or the Yukon at some period because they had to have cross the Bering Land Bridge to travel from Asia to North America . " But , there was never any physical evidence for this until now , " added Zazula .
The fossil teeth were initially get wind during expedition to the Old Crow River in the 1970s . They were then stored in the Canadian Museum of Nature collections with around 50,000 other fogey until palaeontologist Jack Tseng discover decennary - sometime note on the specimens in the Swedish Museum of Natural History .
" The Yukon fossils present one of the last record of this coinage . We estimate the North American coinage ofChasmaporthetesdied out between 1 million and 500,000 years ago,“said study author Tseng , from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB , to IFLScience .
It is these proverbial needle - in - a - hay - mountain fossils that are providing researchers with major progress in their knowledge of spirit during the Pleistocene and Holocene .
" There are several other specie of Ice Age hyenas in Europe , Africa , and Asia , but the other mintage never braved their way across the Arctic into North America , " added Zazula . " We know that Paleolithic hoi polloi interact with some Ice Age hyenas in Europe , because masses painted pictures of them on cave walls . "
Only four specie of hyena rest today – three of the bone - crushing diverseness as well as an ant - eating aardwolf .
" Today the Arctic is a very fragile ecosystem and we have relatively very few large mammals , " say Zazula . " This discovery of fossils that may be about 1 million years old help us paint the picture of how mammal communities in the Arctic and in North America have changed importantly in a very light time stop , in essentially a geological instant .
" These kind of discoveries kind of blank space stakes in the primer coat for our sympathy of the potential of how quickly and significantly fauna populations can convert , move around , and pop off out when their population are pressured by climate changes and rival with other animals . "
