Scientists find woolly mammoth DNA while digging through squirrel faeces

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, scientists said on Tuesday.

The DNA found deep inside sealed-off burrows is between 3,000 and 700,000 years old, offering a rare window into how life has changed over the millennia.

As well as DNA from woolly mammoths – which the US company Colossal claims it is trying to “de-extinct” – genetic material was also found from wolves, bison, horses, a cheetah and hundreds of plants.

Tyler Murchie, a paleogenomics researcher at Canada’s McMaster University and lead author of a new study, admitted that digging through squirrel poo might sound “less appealing” than discovering, say, a mammoth tusk.

However the “spectacular” amount of information they uncovered suggests that faeces is an overlooked way to see into our planet’s distant past, he added.

The scientists had just been expecting to study the squirrel’s microbiome before coming across the “really surprising biodiversity of organisms”, Murchie said.