Working with ancient DNA can be quite painful at times, but hard work pays off (or so they say) and scientists are starting to reap great benefits from their effort by exploring more and more things to extract DNA from.
In the longest infographic ever, I made an attempt to list all of the weird things that people have managed to get ancient DNA from, but it’s quite difficult to evaluate what is weird and what is normal, so just to be sure, I’m also listing the more common sources of samples.
Disclaimer: By no means do I want to say that this is a complete list. I’ve probably missed some cool things, and I’ll be happy if you add them in the comments. Also, I’m only mentioning one study per sample type and it purely serves as an example, so if I didn’t pick your study, please, don’t hate me.
References
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Grealy et al. Eggshell palaeogenomics: Palaeognath evolutionary history revealed through ancient nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from Madagascan elephant bird (Aepyornis sp.) eggshell, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Volume 109, April 2017, Pages 151-163, ISSN 1055-7903, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2017.01.005.
M. D. Teasdale, N. L. van Doorn, S. Fiddyment, C. C. Webb, T. O’Connor, M.Hofreiter, M. J. Collins, D. G. Bradley. Paging through history: parchment as a reservoir of ancient DNA for next generation sequencing. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2015 370 20130379; DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0379.
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Higuchi R, Bowman B, Freiberger M, Ryder OA, Wilson AC. 1984. DNA sequences from the quagga, an extinct member of the horse family. Nature 312, 282–284. doi:10.1038/312282a0
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