Wednesday 4 September 2019

NEWSLINK: A glimpse of Ice Age parasites in 17,000-year-old puma poop

Even after thousands of years of lying around, crap can tell quite the tale. Reporting this week in the journal Parasitology, a team of archaeologists sifting through a knob of puma poo has extracted a 17,000-year-old sample of DNA from Toxascaris leonina, a roundworm that still plagues felines today.

In addition to providing humankind with its oldest example of parasite DNA to date, the dessicated dookie raises some questions about the disease ecology of these big-bodied cats.

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