Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

You have full access to this article via your institution. Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here . Ground squirrels go into a hibernation state called torpor for up to eight months. Credit: Image Professionals GmbH/Alamy DNA sequences from fossilized poo have revealed that ancient relatives of ground squirrels ( Urocitellus sp.) ate a diverse diet of plants, insects and carcasses of megafauna , including woolly mammoths, bison and big cats in a feeding frenzy after they emerged from their winter slumbers. “You can imagine these squirrels emerging from the ground, starting to eat carcasses lying in the environment,” says molecular palaeoecologist Mikkel Pedersen. “They’re zombies of the Pleistocene.” The 700,000-year-old sequences also reveal a previously unknown lineage of ground squirrel and, potentially, North America’s oldest mammoth DNA. Nature | 5 min read Reference: Nature Communications paper A tuberculosis vaccine developed in the 1920s helps to regulate blood sugar in people with certain types of diabetes, enabling them to reduce their insulin use. The findings demonstrate yet another beneficial off-target effect of the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin vaccine , derived from a weakened form of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in cows. The shot has been approved to treat bladder cancer in the United States and is being investigated against conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. …