There is still so much about the Earth that we do not know. Thousands of years of human history are locked in stone. Oceans are awash in secrets that have yet to be whispered. As global warming destroys the world we once knew, new microbes are revealed, causing both wonder and dread in the scientific community.
And what's found in squirrel shit these days is absolutely nuts.
It was the poet William Blake who once wrote about seeing a world in a grain of sand. But even Blake must tip his pen to Tyler Murchie, who has seen entire ecosystems, brimming with creatures long vanished to time–in a pellet of poop.
That's the startling result from a new study in which Dr. Murchie, together with a host of Canadian and international colleagues, documents the rich trove of DNA that he was able to extract from long-frozen ground squirrel droppings harvested from Yukon permafrost.
According to the Globe & Mail, the squirrel scat examined by Dr. Murchie and his team is jam-packed with the DNA of everything the wee mammals sampled on or ate. Given the massive amount of the permafrost preserved poop available for study, the discoveries about the Ice Age steppe where the ground squirrels lived, thousands of years ago have been startling. According to Dr. Murchie, the little buggers would eat anything they could get their jaws around–American cheetah, bison, horse meat and even the odd bit of wooly mammoth.
The teams findings were published this past week in a journal called Nature Communications, which can be found, here. It's fascinating stuff.
