The skull of the fossil dog found in Siberia.

It took 33,000 years, but one Russian dog is finally having its day.

The fossilized remains of a canine found in the 1970s in southern Siberia’s Altay Mountains (see map) is the earliest well-preserved pet dog, new research shows.

Dogs—the oldest domesticated animals—are common in the fossil record up to 14,000 years ago. But specimens from before about 26,500 years ago are very rare. This is likely due to the onset of the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets are at their farthest extent during an ice age.

With such a sparse historical record, scientists have been mostly in the dark as to how and when wolves evolved into dogs, a process that could have happened in about 50 to a hundred years.

“That’s why our find is very important—we have a very lucky case,” said study co-author Yaroslav Kuzmin, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

In the case of the Russian specimen, the animal was just on the cusp of becoming a fully domesticated dog when its breed died out.

(See dog-evolution pictures.)

Dogs Arose at Multiple Sites?

Kuzmin and colleagues recently used radiocarbon dating to examine the skull and jaw of the Russian dog in three independent laboratories. Each lab confirmed the fossil’s age at around 33,000 years old.

Burnt twigs also found at the site, known as Razboinichya Cave, suggest that hunter-gatherers used the space for something, and it’s likely the dog was their pet before its death from unknown causes, Kuzmin said.

Cold temperatures and nonacidic soil in the cave likely kept the dog’s remains from completely decaying, he added.

The team compared the Russian dog fossils with the bones of wild wolves, modern wolves, domesticated dogs, and early doglike canids that lived before 26,500 years ago.

The results showed that the dog—which probably looked like a modern-daySamoyed—most closely resembled fully domesticated dogs from Greenland in size and shape. That’s not to say the two dog types are related, though, since the new study didn’t run DNA analysis.

Because it wasn’t fully domesticated, the Russian dog retained some traits from its ancestors—namely wolf-like teeth. But the animal bore no other resemblance to ancient or modern wolves or to dog breeds from elsewhere in Russia, Kuzmin and colleagues found.

The discovery suggests that this dog began its association with humans independently from other breeds, which would mean that dog domestication didn’t have a single place of origin—contrary to some DNA evidence, the study said.