PELT PICKINGS: The koala collection that Kris Helgen sampled at the Australian Museum in SydneyCOURTESY OF SANDY INGLEBY/PHOTO BY STUART HUMPHREYS
In January 2010, Kris Helgen was deep in the bowels of the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. After selecting flattened koala pelts nestled in metal storage cabinets, he carefully cut away tiny pieces of skin, making a note of where and when each animal had originally been collected.
Helgen is curator-in-charge of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. He had travelled down under to gather samples from historic koala specimens for two old friends, animal biologists who wanted to extract ancient koala DNA to study the genetic history of this iconic marsupial.
With this ability to get genome data from old, degraded samples, [natural history] collections can essentially be used as time machines, allowing us to track genetic ...
