If you want to know about the life and habitat of a woolly mammoth, there is scarcely a better place to look than in its dung. Found frozen in the permafrost or extracted from the intestines of well-preserved specimens, mammoth coprolites are fecal records of the plants which existed in the animal’s local environment and what foods that individual was eating just prior to death. Twigs, fruits, seeds, and other plant bits are common components of mammoth coprolites, but there are also signs that mammoths sometimes picked up the dung of their own species for a little extra digestive processing.

A male woolly mammoth recently discovered in northern Yakutia, Russia ate feces shortly before it died. As reported in a 2008