November 24, 2015 
In far-East Siberia, the winter landscape is as beautiful as it is fatal; an unbroken sheet of white stretching out as far as the eye can see, desolate and frozen. This is the country where wooly mammoths once roamed, and temperatures occasionally plummet to -94 degrees Fahrenheit (-70C).
The Yakutian horse is the native son of this landscape, an equine that has evolved to survive in the region’s extreme cold climate. But a new study has found that the Yakutian’s special adaptations—which include things like a unique hormonal response to the digestion of food and the production of anti-freezing compounds—took only 800 years to develop. Or, when viewed through an evolutionary lens, the blink of an eye.
The study, conducted by an international team of researchers led by Dr. Ludovic Orlando from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week. You can read a full report of the study from PHYS.org here.
