Extinct giant bird DNA recovered from fossil eggs.
If you want to read an extinct bird's genome, you've got to crack a few eggs. That's how DNA has been isolated in a 19,000-year-old emu eggshell – the first time such a feat has been pulled off.
Big extinct birds such as the giant moa, thunderbirds and elephant birds all left eggshells behind them. But the hunt for ancient DNA in the shells has bagged nothing until now.
Charlotte Oskam and Michael Bunce of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, who isolated the DNA, say researchers (including themselves) were using techniques designed to extract DNA from bone, not eggshells. They even threw out the most DNA-hardy bits of eggshell.
Oskam and Bunce successfully isolated mitochondrial DNA from the eggshells of several extinct megafauna, including the giant moa of New Zealand and a 19,000-year-old emu from Australia. They also got DNA from the egg of the elephant bird of Madagascar; at 160 times the volume of a chicken's egg, it is the largest bird's egg known.
