For a couple of years, I shared an office with Dr. Jeremy Austin in London. Jeremy is an affable Australian with an interest in Ancient DNA - that is to say, DNA from species that are now extinct or at least DNA from the ancestors of some of today’s species.
He is busy these days and yesterday I was sent a link about what Jeremy is doing. He is up to his eyes in poo, it seems. Poo from the Tasmanian Tiger (genus Thylacinus). This is a marsupial tiger that went extinct, we believe about a hundred years ago, though there is some debate.
The first successful sequencing of DNA from an extinct species was done by Dr. Richard Thomas, whom I also worked with a long time ago. Richard extracted DNA from the skins of a Thylacine that were in a museum. He published this and ultimately, this finding when it made the news, inspired Jurassic Park.
Anyway, Jeremy is working on Thylacine DNA these days and you can read more about it here.
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