Tyler J. Murchie

Dr. Tyler Murchie is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre in Hamilton, Canada with Professor Hendrik Poinar, with whom Tyler did his Ph.D. research on ancient environmental DNA recovered from the Yukon Territory. Tyler has been developing new techniques for recovering and utilizing sedimentary ancient DNA from permafrost and lake sediments to understand the environmental turnover and mass extinction of ice-age megafauna such as woolly mammoth, horse, and steppe bison during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (11,700 years ago). Through the techniques Tyler has developed, a new scale of environmental DNA resolution has been made possible, wherein the simultaneous transition of plants and animals can be observed solely through the molecular remnants those organisms left behind on ancient landscapes. Moreover, Tyler’s work has hinted at the late survival of ice age horses and mammoths in the Yukon thousands of years after their last dated fossil remains, and highlights the potential to recover genomic-scale information from many diverse organisms simultaneously, solely through environmental DNA preserved for millennia in sediments and soils.

Tyler has also been working on various other archaeological applications of environmental DNA aimed towards understanding human-ecological interactions in deep time. Beyond ice age environmental DNA, Tyler has contributed to published research on the population history of ancient Romans with palaeogenomics and stable isotopes, as well as northern plains archaeology with ancient DNA and projectile point systematics during his masters and B.Sc. (hons) degrees at the University of Calgary.