Tyler Murchie

speaker

109 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Tyler Murchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Science Friday · Squirrel poop drops Ice Age clues + The neuroscience of laughter · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

Thanks.

It's awesome to be here.

I would definitely say so.

At the beginning of the field, there was a lot of people who had worked with paleofeces to try to get DNA.

But it's always kind of been this undercurrent of the field because people really gravitate towards, you know, the big, amazing tusk of the woolly mammoth or these super cool bones.

The idea of looking at poop,

You know, it's not as flashy of a sample type.

And so a lot of these have just kind of been in cold storage for some time.

And I think this paper and some of our other ongoing work is really highlighting you can get amazing ancient biomolecules from unsuspecting sources like, you know, old poop.

Yeah.

So a lot of this fieldwork is done by folks like Scott Cocker and Dwayne Fraze.

And they go out to these areas in the Yukon that are these placer gold mines.

And so the miners are there trying to thaw gold out of the permafrost sediments.

And so they spray water cannons on the walls.

This thaws out the gold.

It ends up in the river bottoms.

But then the thing that they maybe don't expect to find are tons and tons of fossils.

And so tens of thousands of remains of mammoths and step-eisen and all the Ice Age critters you can imagine end up exposed.

But you also see in these large vertical exposures a whole bunch of pockets of ground squirrel burrows.

And these burrows and remains in general age between, you know, thousands of years ago to our oldest samples here are 700,000 years old, which is, you know, really ancient.

Showing 1–20 of 109 · page 1 of 6