Scientists just recreated part of the Ice Age ecosystem using something nobody expected: 700,000-year-old squirrel poop. 💩🐿️🦣
Researchers studying ancient Arctic ground-squirrel burrows preserved in the permafrost of Canada’s Yukon Territory recovered an incredible genetic archive containing traces of woolly mammoths, steppe bison, horses, wolves, hares, plants, insects, microbes, and more.
Yes. Mammoth DNA. In squirrel poop.
In this video, we’re digging into:
🧬 How DNA survived for hundreds of thousands of years
🐿️ Why prehistoric ground-squirrel burrows became biological time capsules
🦣 How scientists detected mammoths, bison, horses, and other extinct animals
💩 Why coprolites are much more scientifically valuable than they look
🌳 How the discovery rewrote part of the ground-squirrel family tree
🧟 Why one researcher described these squirrels as “zombies of the Pleistocene”
❄️ And why melting Arctic permafrost could destroy ancient genetic archives before scientists ever get the chance to study them
Sometimes science gives us a magnificent dinosaur skeleton.
Sometimes it gives us a 700,000-year-old frozen squirrel turd.
Both are apparently useful.
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#IceAge #Pleistocene #AncientDNA #Science #WoollyMammoth #Paleontology #Yukon #Permafrost #SquirrelPoop #PoopScience
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