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A huge treasure trove of ancient DNA from animals, including extinct woolly mammoths, has been discovered in frozen squirrel faeces in Canada’s remote Yukon territory.
The DNA is between 3,000 and 700,000 years old, offering a rare window into how life has changed over the millennia.
Tyler Murchie is the lead author of this new study and a palaeogenomics researcher at Canada’s McMaster University. He said that the “spectacular” amount of information they found suggested that faeces is an overlooked way to see into our planet’s distant past.
When these Arctic ground squirrels were not hibernating, they packed their burrows with anything they could find. But over time, rising permafrost sealed off some burrows, creating a preserved time capsule for scientists to study.
