Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise:
DNA taken from the hair of two extinct Tasmanian “tigers” suggests the Australian marsupials last seen 70 years ago may have become too inbred to survive as a species, researchers reported on Monday.
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The thylacine was hunted by European settlers and declared extinct in 1936 when the last zoo specimen died.The research team pulled and sequenced DNA from the hair of a male thylacine brought to the U.S. National Zoo in Washington in 1902 and a female that died in the London Zoo in 1893.
They got sequences both from the nucleus of the cell, and the mitochondria, where DNA is passed down with few changes from mother to offspring.
Penn State’s Stephan Schuster said the work, described in a study in the journal Genome Research, shows it is possible to use hair to resurrect extinct animals — and perhaps to some day do so in real life.
“The speculation was that the only reason we were able to extract DNA from mammoth hair is that the mammoths had remained frozen in the Arctic permafrost, but our success with the Tasmanian tiger shows that hair can protect DNA for long periods under a variety of environmental conditions,” Schuster said.
I’ve mentioned the Thylacine before.