Idaho rodents depart behind 45,000-year-old time capsules for scientific examine | Montana Untamed

Listening to Betancourt describe his midden degree is like taking a science college course.

This summer, Claire Veseth, a master naturalist from Boise, Idaho, was hiking with friends in the City of Rocks and noticed large piles of earth hanging from the rocks.

“I knocked on it with my walking stick and said, ‘This stuff is hard as a stone,'” said Veseth. “Then we noticed the silver shield underneath with a small circle nailed into the rock. It said ‘576’. I said someone would look at these things. “

Veseth contacted Betancourt and found out about his studies of dung heaps in the City of Rocks and elsewhere.

“We asked him about Midden 576 and he said one shift was 4,100 years old, give or take 15 years, and the other shift was 4,900 years old, give or take,” Veseth said. “I was thrilled to find out all of this information. I wonder what I miss in all these other places I’ve seen. “

Essentially, the crystallized urine becomes a time capsule, a snapshot of the ecology at the time the pack rat lived and gathered. A sample of piles of wood dated 10,000 years ago is on display in the visitor center of the City of Rocks in Almo.

“If you get a sample out of this dunghill, it’s rock hard,” said Betancourt. “We clean them very well. Then we bring it back to the lab and keep cleaning it up. Since the piss is crystalline urine and is water soluble, we toss it in a bucket of water and it dissolves over a period of a week or two, releasing all of that plant debris that the pack rats have collected. Then we passed it through a geological sieve. Then place on a paper plate and dry. Then we sit there and sort. We separate things that we are going to analyze. Many of the plant fragments are in pretty good condition. We can often identify the species. “