B.C. scientists have struck gold in the Yukon’s Klondike region.

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They’ve discovered what they call a treasure trove of Ice Age DNA information stored in the unlikeliest of places: frozen poop from ancient squirrels.

An international team, including researchers from B.C.’s Hakai Institute, analyzed the ancient ground squirrel droppings — known as coprolites — preserved in the Yukon permafrost, with samples ranging from 17,000 years old to 700,000 years old.

What they found was surprising: not just DNA from plants and insects, typical of a squirrel diet, but from large paleolithic animals such as woolly mammoths, horses, bison and cheetahs.

“It’s pretty wild, and really not what we were expecting initially,” said Tyler Murchie, a paleogenomics researcher with B.C.’s Hakai Institute and an adjunct assistant professor at McMaster University.

“I thought, oh, we’ll get the squirrel DNA, we’ll get their gut microbiome, and that’ll be interesting in a variety of ways. But getting mammoth DNA in there — wow … these are paleoecological gold mines of information.”

At 700,000 years old, the woolly mammoth DNA found is the oldest yet in North America, said Murchie.

He called the mammoth discovery “very significant” with evolutionary implications but added that scientists are going to be doing a separate study just on that finding alone, so more details will be revealed later.

While many might think of squirrels as nibbling-on-nuts herbivores (like that crazy squirrel that chases the nut from the Ice Age movie franchise), they are omnivores.

“Ground squirrels have be documented feasting on a carcass of a moose or a lynx,” he said, adding the ancient ground squirrels that were scavenging mammoth or cheetah carrion would have looked similar to arboreal forest squirrels today albeit slightly larger.

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Murchie, who was the lead author of the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Communications, worked with a team of researchers from Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S.

They gathered the squirrel pellets from several sites in the Klondike region of Yukon, known for a massive gold rush in the late 1800s that led tens of thousands of prospectors to the region in northwestern Canada.

Murchie said to this day gold prospectors still work in the area and often stumble across ancient bones that they will then share with scientists.

“There’d be these folks going up there to look for gold and they discovered that as the permafrost would melt, the gold would end up in the bottom of the river … but then they found along the way mummies of mammoths and thousands of bones perfectly preserved for thousands of years,” he said.

“So up in the Klondike, doing this kind of work is often closely tied with the gold miners.”

For the coprolites study, the team gathered the samples from ancient squirrel burrows in the permafrost and then sequenced the DNA using a genetics bank database, which took four months.

“These things were just sitting in a freezer for a long time. Who knew that they were so valuable?”

Coprolites have been studied before, said Murchie, but never to the same degree and not as in depth as this study has done with the ancient DNA findings.

He added this work allows scientists to understand what biodiversity looked like in the past, how many organisms were around and what the ecosystem looked like.

The ancient pellets preserved show us “detailed snapshots of ecosystems that no longer exist,” he said.

Scientists are racing against the clock to preserve coprolites and fossils in the permafrost because of the rapid pace of thaw in the north due to human-caused climate change. Murchie said there are scientists trying to archive these findings quickly because of how fast they are degrading.

ticrawford@postmedia.com