It smelt. That was the first thing Tyler Murchie noticed when he opened up a sample that had sat frozen for hundreds of thousands of years in the permafrost of Canada's Yukon. These weren’t your average fossils; they had not gone through the slow mineral replacement that turns old dinosaur dung to stone. All the organics were still in there, perfectly intact, still pungent, and absolutely packed with genetic gold.
According to a June 2026 study published in Nature Communications by Murchie and his colleagues at the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, those fossilized feces, known as coprolites, are not just the byproduct of a small rodent’s bathroom habits. They are detailed biological records of a whole lost world: one that included woolly mammoths, American cheetahs, steppe bison, horses, wolves and hundreds of plant and insect species that once defined Ice Age North America.
