NATURE knows best when it comes to preserving ancient DNA. The DNA in fossils that are cleaned and preserved in museums degrades far faster than in bones left in the ground.
The extraction and sequencing of fossil DNA promises a wealth of information on extinct species. Yet little has been recovered from the most easily accessible sources, those in museum collections. To see why, Eva-Maria Geigl of the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris and colleagues compared DNA recovery from museum samples with those from freshly excavated fossils stored under conditions similar to natural burial. The fresh samples yielded six times…
