Story at a glance:
- Researchers found ancient bear genetic codes from soil that had been defecated on.
- They were able to reconstruct an entire genome for the first time.
- The ancient bears are similar to the North American black bear.
Researchers are saying the discovery of an extinct bear’s feces is similar to when man landed on the moon.
The University of Copenhagen discovered an ancient bear species’ genetic code after examining DNA found in soil that contained feces.
Inside the rural Mexican Chiquihuite Cave, the ancient bears defecated, Popular Mechanics reported.
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Researchers gathered DNA from several individuals from about 16,000 years ago and were able to piece together the entire genome.
“When an animal or a human urinates or defecates, cells from the organism are also excreted,” geneticist Eske Willerslev told ScienceAlert. “We have shown that hair, urine, and feces all provide genetic material which, in the right conditions, can survive for much longer than 10,000 years.”
Chiquihuite black bears resemble modern bears in North America, but the ancient bears also shared ancestry with black bears in Alaska. The team was also able to identify genetic material from extinct giant short-faced bears.
The pieces of the environment DNA (eDNA) were pieced together using other bear species as templates, according to the study published in Current Biology.
Although a fossil of an animal presents how the animal was structured, fossil records are not 100 percent complete information because it often does not inform researchers what the whole species’ genetic information was like.
Willerslev told ScienceAlert the new study is “the moon landing of genomics” because it allows study of the genome without any fossils.
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