I think this is very cool: we are able to tell what woolly mammoths ate because sometimes their poop happened to land in permafrost, where it proceeded not to decompose for thousands of years. There are still little bits of undigested plant material. Fecal pollen grains lend themselves especially well to identification because their outer casings are virtually indestructible, meaning they undergo little to no digestion before being passed.
Rarely, the entire animal was frozen when it died (though not in perfect condition), and now scientists are starting to starting to sequence not only mammoth DNA but
also the DNA of their intestinal microflora. The combined insights of these animals' diet and microbial symbionts are helping to illuminate the evolution of the mammalian microbiome and the dietary factors that influence it over a much longer span of time that has previously been possible.
Image from Nova's Science Now, http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0306/images/03-mamm-01.jpg
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