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Researchers Investigated Ancient Squirrel Poop Frozen in Permafrost and Found Enlightening Details About the Animal's Ecosystem
Key takeaways
- Tyler Murchie and Scott Cocker When most people imagine paleontologists at work, they likely envision researchers investigating giant dinosaur fossils or a long-frozen woolly mammoth.
- In a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers investigated frozen ground squirrel poop unearthed in Canada’s Yukon Territory that dates back up to hundreds of thousands of years ago.
- The coprolites, recovered from the ancient dens of Urocitellus ground squirrels, are between 30,000 and 700,000 years old and yielded environmental DNA from other species of plants, microbes, insects and large mammals.
Tyler Murchie and Scott Cocker When most people imagine paleontologists at work, they likely envision researchers investigating giant dinosaur fossils or a long-frozen woolly mammoth. Sometimes, however, the best snapshots of ancient landscapes come from significantly less dramatic remains.
In a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers investigated frozen ground squirrel poop unearthed in Canada’s Yukon Territory that dates back up to hundreds of thousands of years ago. The region’s permafrost preserved not just the ancient feces (called coprolites) but also a shocking amount of genetic information from other forms of life that shared these ground squirrels' landscape, including woolly mammoth DNA.
The coprolites, recovered from the ancient dens of Urocitellus ground squirrels, are between 30,000 and 700,000 years old and yielded environmental DNA from other species of plants, microbes, insects and large mammals. While the habitat and ecology captured in the poop are long gone, Urocitellus ground squirrels are still around.