Overview
- The study, published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, reports sequencing of environmental DNA from 13 Arctic ground squirrel coprolites recovered in the Yukon and dated between about 30,000 and 700,000 years ago.
- Laboratory analysis allowed reconstruction of 18 mitochondrial genomes, including 12 ground squirrels, one hare, two bison, and three horses, and detected DNA from woolly mammoths, cheetahs, wolves, plants, insects and microbes.
- Researchers say the squirrels’ habit of caching food and long hibernation, combined with permafrost sealing burrows, created tightly preserved 'time capsules' that concentrated diverse environmental material.
- The team cautions that some signals could come from later surface contamination and that species calls are limited by incomplete ancient-DNA reference databases, and they plan to make the genetic dataset publicly available.
- The paper reveals a previously unknown ground-squirrel lineage about 700,000 years old with ties to western Siberia and sets up follow-up work on mammoth evolution while offering a new complementary record to bones and teeth for studying past climates and extinctions.