elephant bird

DNA from the largest bird ever sequenced from fossil eggshells

edyong | March 9, 2010

Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced "first drafts" of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even recovered DNA from dinosaurs. Now, a variety of extinct birds join the ancient DNA club including the largest that ever lived - Aepyornis, the elephant bird. In a first for palaeontology, Charlotte Oskam from Murdoch University, Perth, extracted DNA from 18 fossil eggshells, either directly…

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