Not the most delicate way to put it, but true, as some paleontological sleuthing shows...
Scientists went prospecting along Alaska’s Yukon River, not for gold, but for soil samples in the permafrost looking for DNA from the urine and feces of ice-age mammals.
They struck it rich, and identified DNA from mammoth, bison, moose, horse, and snow shoe hare. The mammoth and horse DNA came from sedimentary layers about 10,000 years old—that is more recent than the youngest known fossil bones of these animals by at least 300 years.
The permafrost DNA implies that these species survived longer than originally presumed on the basis of the skeletal fossil remains, and indicates that the ice-age extinction of large mammals in North America was not a sudden event as previously thought.
Photo credit and more info: http://www.physorg.com/news180095166.html
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