When Zoe Landry was heading into her fourth year in Carleton University’s Earth Sciences program, she needed to find a focus for her honours research thesis.
Adjunct Prof. Danielle Fraser, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, invited Landry to visit the museum’s expansive collection of fossils at its facility in Gatineau, Que. They walked and talked amid the bones and skulls and came upon some gray wolf specimens.
Landry had always loved animals and was interested in extinction, the Arctic and isotope ecology—studying chemical traces in tissue samples to learn about the behaviour of ancient species. As she and Fraser talked, a project was born.
That research—which is detailed in a paper in the June 2021 issue of Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, with Landry the lead author—led to the discovery that gray wolves, in what is now the Yukon, were able to shift their diet at the end of the last Ice Age nearly 12,000 years ago, from a primary reliance on horses to caribou and moose, which allowed them to emerge as one of the largest predators to survive the climate change-driven extinction.
This finding—a rare accomplishment for an undergraduate student, although Landry is quick to credit Fraser and their co-collaborators—has implications for today’s conservation efforts. It shows that while certain species are resilient and can successfully adapt, preserving the populations and habitat of potential new food sources is critical.
“The past is the key to the present and the future,” says Landry.