IT IS not quite Jurassic Park, but it could prove just as interesting. This week, researchers announced they have reconstructed a million-letter-long DNA sequence from a mammal that lived 75 million years ago and was the ancestor to almost all the mammals now roaming the Earth, including people. The ultimate aim is to reconstruct the entire genome of this long-extinct species.
“This is proof of principle,” says bioinformatician David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the research. A reconstruction would allow biologists to trace the evolutionary changes that led to mammals as different as moose, mice and humans. And if scientists know the genomes of animals past, they…
