Not much can grow in northwest Canada's permafrost. Like its name, the ground is permanently frozen and supports little life save for moss, lichen and shallow-rooted shrubs—but deep down, the permafrost houses an entirely different kind of "life."
The last waves of ancient people from whom today's First Nations groups are descended from traveled to the Yukon at least 15,000 years ago, but tens of thousands of years prior to that, megafauna ruled the Yukon. Permafrost perfectly preserved the bodies of these Ice Age animals that were not scavenged, including DNA, and they make for some awesome findings that you can check out below.
Wolf (Canis lupus) pup Zhùr that lived 57,000 years ago is the most complete mummified wolf that has ever been found. (Image source: Government of Yukon)
Western camel (Camelops hesternus) bones provided concrete evidence that they were more closely related to modern camels than llamas. (Image source: Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre; Heintzman et. al, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2015)
Teeth belonging to an ancient Arctic hyena (Chasmaporthetes) that lived approximately 850,000 to 1.4 million years ago, a rarity almost like a needle in a haystack. (Image source: Julius T. Csotonyi; Grant Zazula, Government of Yukon)
Bones and teeth of a giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) that lived 10,000 to 50,000 years ago. Giant beavers were the size of modern black bears equipped with a pair of six-inch incisors, but they fed on aquatic plants like pond weeds. (Image source: Canadian Museum of Nature; Plint et al., Scientific Reports, 2019)