Something that was once considered to be impossible for ferocious creatures to do, something like this, has turned over, since a team of Canadian researchers have been able to find that squirrels raise orphan strays with their own offspring.

Andrew McAdam, a Biology Professor at the University of Guelph, and four other scientists said that they found that female red squirrels will take in wandering animals of the same species, in order to raise them as their own.

The situation is uncommon but yet it does happen, the researchers noted in a paper that was published in the most recent edition of the journal Nature Communications.

Adoptive behavior was comparatively common amongst animals that live in packs, for example lions, but is not frequently found amongst mammals that live on their own, such as squirrels.

On top of that, it has been seen by the scientists that the squirrels will only take care of those relatives that have been left astray, which is an indication of a conscious effort of selection via this procedure and is not a coincidence.

In the 20 years that the scientists gauged these animals, they could only uncover five adoptions out of 2,200 litters, which is a rate of 0.2%.