Mammoth Eating Squirrels: Urocitellus
Meet Urocitellus, a diverse genus of ground squirrels that have been around for over 700 thousand years used to terrorize Yukon Canada! That may be a little hyperbolic, but it may not be. Recently, researchers analyzed coprolites from these small rodents and found traces of animal remains, including bison and wooly mammoths!
Trevor Schulz
6/15/20261 min read
Publication Info:
Transcript:
Murchie, T.J., Cocker, S.L., Baleka, S. et al. Ground squirrel coprolites preserve complex archives of ancient environmental DNA over 700,000 years. Nat Commun17, 4868 (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72977-6
Meet Urocitellus, a diverse genus of ground squirrels that have been around for over 700 thousand years used to terrorize Yukon Canada! That may be a little hyperbolic, but it may not be. Recently, researchers analyzed coprolites from these small rodents and found traces of animal remains, including bison and wooly mammoths!
Episode 292
Notes:
Have you heard about the mammoth eating squirrels yet? Here's your most recent paleontology news almost daily or whenever I get around to it. First things first, in case you don't realize it, squirrels are not just peaceful little vegetarians that just eat nuts and hang out in trees. Like almost all herbivores, they will definitely eat meat, bone, etc. when they have access to it. Recently, there were a whole bunch of reports coming out of California of squirrels being caught hunting and eating voles and mice. Which again, if you're at all used to dealing with animals, it's not super shocking. But to some people, it really is. And unsurprisingly, that behavior is not exactly expected to be new like in really any herbivores, never mind rodents. But what is surprising is the size of the animals they used to eat. This is Urocitellus, and these are Urocitellus coprolites or fossilized droppings dating back to up to 700,000 years ago. And thanks to these droppings not only being buried in burrows because Urocitellus was a ground squirrel, they were also locked away in permafrost, which preserves things like DNA really well. And researchers were just able to use that genetic data to find out what was in Urocitellus' environment everywhere from 700,000 to 17,000 years ago. And unsurprisingly, given the source, it's the things that it was eating. Some of which you definitely expect being from plants, but also animal material from animals as big as woolly mammoths and bison. Obviously, nobody's suggesting that a bunch of ground squirrels were out there swarming mammoths to take them down. But it does look like they were at least scavenging material from really good-sized animals pretty regularly. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.