{"id":632006,"date":"2026-06-10T22:55:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T22:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/632006\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T22:55:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T22:55:16","slug":"ancient-ground-squirrels-feasted-on-carcasses-like-zombies-of-the-pleistocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/632006\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient ground squirrels feasted on carcasses like \u2018zombies of the Pleistocene\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"figure__image\" alt=\"An Arctic ground squirrel with its cheeks full of food in a Tundra landscape with snow patches visible in the background.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/d41586-026-01840-x_52523730.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure__caption u-sans-serif\">Ground squirrels go into a hibernation state called torpor for up to eight months. Credit: Image Professionals GmbH\/Alamy<\/p>\n<p>Ground squirrels spend many months in a winter slumber, and then awake ravenous and eat anything and everything in sight. A study of 700,000-year-old DNA from coprolites \u2014 fossilized poo \u2014 has now revealed that when ancient relatives of ground squirrels (Urocitellus sp.) woke up, they ate a diverse diet of plants, insects and carcasses of megafauna, including woolly mammoths, bison and big cats.<\/p>\n<p>The DNA sequences, reported in a 9 June Nature Communications study<a href=\"#ref-CR1\" data-track=\"click\" data-action=\"anchor-link\" data-track-label=\"go to reference\" data-track-category=\"references\">1<\/a>, reveal a previously unknown lineage of ground squirrel and, potentially, North America\u2019s oldest mammoth DNA.<\/p>\n<p>There are 13 species of ground squirrel in the genus Urocitellus, and they are found mostly in northwestern North America and Asia. Ground squirrels are named for their earthen burrows, where they can spend up to eight months of the year in a hibernation-like state called torpor.<\/p>\n<p>When they emerge, \u201cthey\u2019re desperate for protein and high-quality diet items\u201d, says Bryan McLean, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. \u201cI\u2019ve seen them eating roadkill individuals of the same species.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"figure__image\" alt=\"A cluster of fossilised Arctic ground squirrel faecal pellets, roughly the size of a fist, preserved in the permafrost alongside a pick axe for size comparison.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/d41586-026-01840-x_52523736.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure__caption u-sans-serif\">The coprolites, or pellets of fossilized faeces, were found in the Klondike region of Canada. Credit: Scott Cocker<\/p>\n<p>In the Klondike region of Canada\u2019s Yukon territory, gold-mining practices that dissolve permafrost deposits using jets of water have also uncovered ancient ground-squirrel burrows filled with coprolites.<\/p>\n<p>Tyler Murchie, a biomolecular archaeologist at the Hakai Institute in Heriot Bay, Canada, and his colleagues wondered whether the coprolites would serve as a genetic archive of past ecosystems \u2014 through the lens of ground-squirrel diets.<\/p>\n<p>The coprolites were dated to between around 700,000 and 17,000 years old, during a geological period, known as the Pleistocene, that was punctuated by ice ages, and when mammoths, bison, horse and other megafauna roamed North America.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Murchie was initially amazed when mitochondrial-DNA sequences from this \u2018ice-age cast\u2019 turned up in the coprolites \u2014 as did sequences from rodents, bats and birds; invertebrates, including parasitic worms; and plants such as grasses and sedges. Big-cat DNA belonged to either the North American cheetah (Miracinonyx trumani), Murchie suspects, or to pumas (Puma concolor).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can imagine these squirrels emerging from the ground, starting to eat carcasses lying in the environment,\u201d says Mikkel Pedersen, a molecular palaeoecologist at the University of Copenhagen. \u201cThey\u2019re zombies of the Pleistocene.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ground squirrels go into a hibernation state called torpor for up to eight months. Credit: Image Professionals GmbH\/Alamy&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4390,59,5459,4230,4231,60724,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-632006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-evolution","tag-gb","tag-genomics","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-palaeontology","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}