Speculist scoops Nature!

First, the Cave Bear, now Neanderthal Man. German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday. When the sequencing of the cave bear was announced last month (Only last month! The world is moving fast on this.) it was explained how they were […]

We are a big step closer to Jurassic-Park-style species resurrection. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute has sequenced the DNA for the extinct Pleistocene cave bear species. In the past scientists have found it next to impossible to extract useful DNA from such old samples. While some information was thought to remain, broken […]

Scientists have created the first new mammal family since 1974, when the bumblebee bat was discovered. Say hello to the southeast asian rock rat, laonastes aenigmamus, a previously undiscovered rodent which is said to resemble a cross between a rat and a squirrel, but which is in fact a fairly distant relative of any other […]

Britain’s “Frozen Ark” project boarded its first endangered passengers on Monday: an Arabian oryx, a Socorro dove, a mountain chicken, a Banggai cardinal, a spotted sea horse, a British field cricket and Polynesian tree snails. The “ark”, a project by three British institutions, doesn’t include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and […]