They lived in frozen wastelands with sparse food supplies, but Woolly mammoths had a dirty habit that may have helped them delay their eventual extinction – they ate their own dung.
The researchers discovered the mammoth, a large four ton male found in Yukagir, northern Russia, had mainly eaten grass that would have been frozen beneath layers of snow and ice.
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But the most revealing finding were spores from a fungus that only grows on dung when it has been exposed to the air, suggesting the animal had been eating dung. Further analysis revealed it must have been mammoth dung.
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