Ancient squirrel feces offer ‘time capsule’ of environment thousands of years ago
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
We need your support!
Local journalism needs your support!
As we navigate through unprecedented times, our journalists are working harder than ever to bring you the latest local updates to keep you safe and informed.
Now, more than ever, we need your support.
Starting at $15.99 plus taxes every four weeks you can access your Brandon Sun online and full access to all content as it appears on our website.
Subscribe Nowor call circulation directly at (204) 727-0527.
Your pledge helps to ensure we provide the news that matters most to your community!
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Brandon Sun access to your Free Press subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on brandonsun.com
- Read the Brandon Sun E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
*Your next Free Press subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $20.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
A researcher in British Columbia recently discovered that ancient squirrel scat can still smell just as fresh today as it did some 700,000 years ago.
Tyler Murchie, a scientist with the Hakai Institute, says the dung preserved by permafrost and collected in ground squirrel burrows in Yukon didn’t smell like anything at first, but once he inserted fluid to release the genetic material it contained, there was an “overwhelming” smell.
Murchie is the lead author of a new peer-reviewed study that used the frozen feces pellets dating from between 17,000 and 700,000 years ago to identify an array of plant and animal life in Yukon’s Klondike region, including woolly mammoths.
The palaeogenomics researcher likened the pellets to “little frozen time capsules” providing a snapshot of the environment when the squirrels were alive.
Murchie says the squirrels and the burrows where their feces were collected may not be as “charismatic” as woolly mammoths, cheetahs and other large animals that once roamed the landscape, but they offer “huge” information potential.
He says studying the ancient feces has the potential to help researchers understand shifts between interglacial periods and offer insight into the current period, the Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago.
“One of the areas that I’m most excited to get into is the last interglacial. So, this was about 115,000 thousand years ago, when it was warmer than it is today … and I think that period will really help us understand, how anomalous is the Holocene?” Murchie says.
“It might be that we’ve broken the glacial-interglacial cycling and that we may not enter another glacial period.
And what that means, who knows.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2026.