Ice Age squirrels ate the meat of woolly mammoths
Frozen waste found in the Canadian Arctic reveals that ancient ground squirrels scavenged the carcasses of massive predators and megafauna to survive.
Deep within the permafrost of the Yukon, researchers discovered a biological time capsule in the form of frozen squirrel droppings. Analysis of the waste, which dates back as far as 700,000 years, reveals that these ancient rodents were not the strict herbivores their modern descendants are. Instead, they were opportunistic scavengers that feasted on the remains of the massive animals sharing their grassland habitat.
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