Resumen de Horse sets record for oldest genome
A horse has just taken humans further back in time than ever before. The genome of a 700,000-year-old fossil has been sequenced, suggesting humans could do the same with other long-extinct creatures--including early hominins like Homo erectus. Small DNA fragments have survived up to 500,000 years, but until now, the oldest complete genome had come from 110,000-year-old polar bear remains. Pushing that back to 700,000 years is a big jump, says Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Willerslev's collaborator Ludovic Orlando, also at the University of Copenhagen, scoured a horse bone found in the permafrost of northwest Canada in 2003 for pockets of collagen.
