Published:
November 26, 2013 12:50 pm EST
It has been announced that the oldest DNA ever sequenced has come via a 700,000-year-old horse that was found in 2003 in Canadian permafrost near the Alaska/Yukon border.
As an article by Western Digs explains, the find has allowed an international team of researchers to conclude that the genus Equus dates back more than four million years, which is twice as long as researchers had previously believed.
The report states that the permafrost helped slow the rate of decay of the sample and that the targeting of specific DNA preservation niches in the sample – in this case, collagen in bones – allowed researchers to come to their ground-breaking conclusions.
(With files from Western Digs)
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