Sentences with phrase «moa dna»
Morten Erik Allentoft of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, an expert on moa DNA and other extinct genomes, called it «a significant step forward.»
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Morten Allentoft of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues studied DNA from 281 fossils of four moa species.
Earlier studies used DNA to claim the moa population was 3 million at 4000 BC and just 159,000 when humans arrived.
As it happens, moas were also the subject of Cooper's first foray into ancient DNA: He spent a year in the late 1980s working on them at the University of California at Berkeley, when paleogenetics was still an embryonic field.
Cooper first compared moa and kiwi DNA to see if the two flightless birds were closely related.
To do that, Harvard's Alison Cloutier and the rest of the little bush moa team (which declined to talk about the work before its formal publication) took their 900 million nucleotides, scattered across millions of DNA pieces, and tried to match them to specific locations on the genome of the emu, a close relative of all nine moa species.
Oskam and Bunce successfully isolated mitochondrial DNA from the eggshells of several extinct megafauna, including the giant moa of New Zealand and a 19,000 - year - old emu from Australia.
Using ancient DNA from 281 individual moas from four different species, including Dinornis robustus (at 2 meters, the tallest moa, able to reach foliage 3.6 meters above the ground), and radiocarbon dating, Allentoft and his colleagues set out to determine the moas» genetic and population history over the last 4000 years.
But the diversity of those tiny bits of DNA was growing, including DNA from the Tasmanian tiger, dodo bird, the New Zealand Moa, the mammoth, woolly rhino, saber - toothed cats, Egyptian mummies, and even Neanderthals.