Ancient squirrel feces offer 'time capsule' of environment thousands of years ago

Researchers document a cluster of ancient Arctic ground squirrel fecal pellets preserved in permafrost at Hunker Creek, Yukon, in an August 2022, handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout — Scott Cocker

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.

Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press