A gold miner found a mysterious grapefruit-sized fur ball. It turned out to be a ‘perfectly preserved’ 30,000-year-old squirrel
But X-ray scans have revealed that this grapefruit-sized lump is a 30, 000-year- old mummified ground squirrel from the ice age. A gold miner found the Mysterious fur ball in 2018 in the Klondike gold fields near Dawson City, Yukon, according to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre. “It’s not quite recognizable until you see these little hands and these claws, and you see a little tail, and then you see ears,” Grant Zazula, a Yukon government paleontologist, told CBC in March. He took it to Jess Heath, a veterinarian, for further investigation. Heath conducted X-ray scans that revealed that the frozen hair ball was a young, curled-up Arctic ground squirrel . It likely died in hibernation, possibly during its first year. “We could see that it was in great condition and it was just curled up like it was sleeping,” Heath told CBC. “I’m really impressed that someone recognized it for what it was. From the outside, it just kind of looks like a brown blob. It looks a b...