Tyler Murchie

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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

Yeah, that's another great question.

I think in part, it's sort of a natural enrichment of the environmental DNA that's on that landscape anyway.

We're shedding DNA all the time, and if that DNA ends up in the sediment, it can end up binding to minerals in the sediment and preserving long term.

I would think the DNA that passed through the digestive system of a squirrel, you wouldn't think that that would have great preservation.

So it's kind of wild to imagine that these coprolites would be that well preserved.

And so I don't know if it's just there's so much to begin with that it could make up for the fact that there is natural degradation from those microbes.

Or maybe there's some other sort of microbiome effect where the bacteria in the poop are protecting it from the kind of other environmental bacteria that might break down that DNA.

So that's definitely an area that we want to get more into.

I'm sure there's some chemistry involved for why the DNA is preserving so well.

Yeah, well, one of them that's kind of a tentative call in our assignments is we had hits to Puma, which is a cougar.

But there weren't cougars, as far as we know, in northern Yukon at that time.

They really came from South America.

But when we look at the hits to PUMA, they also match to American cheetah.

But there wasn't an American cheetah genome available on the reference database at the time, so it hit the next closest ancestor, which was cougar.

I suspect these are actually cheetah breeds, American cheetah, which is actually, it's kind of a little bit of a misnomer.

They're not that closely related to cheetahs in Africa.

I think they initially thought they were.

And so this is sort of a little bit of a challenge of, well, were either cougars present here much deeper in the past or was it this other organism?

There's some more investigations needed there.

But then when we get into the squirrels, that's a whole other can of worms in that there is maybe several additional species that have just kind of been assumed to all be the same thing.

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