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.

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

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

basically a snapshot of the Ice Age in ground squirrel poop.

And even more DNA than we typically find even in the sediments in these areas.

So it's really this kind of enriched picture of all these different animals and plants and fungi and microbes.

And not only are we getting individual little fragments of these organisms that we're able to identify as, oh, yep, this definitely belongs to, you know, this species of grass or this belongs to like this type of herb.

We can actually start reassembling the genomes of these different organisms all at the same time and stitch those back together to then look at how they're related to other things today.

And so there's all sorts of applications you can get into.

How did... And the kind of the... Go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that...

The big question is, well, why is this all this DNA in there?

Like, why is it not just squirrel DNA?

Yeah, so one of the important parts is that Arctic ground squirrels, they are in hibernation or state of torpor for about eight months of the year.

So they really are unconscious most of the time and in their burrows.

And so the period of the year that they're actually awake, they need to be out on that landscape getting everything they can for nutrition and nutrition.

Even when we first started, I kind of just assumed ground squirrels were mostly eating nuts and seeds and stuff like that.

I didn't realize that they are really kind of like little bears almost.

So we think...

There were so many big animals around during the Pleistocene.

There was this kind of paradox of productivity, tons of big organisms all over the place.

And there was dead carcasses of mammoths around and such.

And we think that they're eating those remains and bringing back bones and bits of tissues to their nest to help make it through, you know, cold winter months during the Ice Age, during extremely cold periods of time.

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