Darwin was mix up when he observe the fossils of a bizarre Ice Age animal in 1834 during his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle . With the limited amount of bones available , even his great nous could n’t project out what chemical group of animal this specimen belonged to . Years later , the bones were pass on to renowned paleontologistRichard Owenfor him to figure out , but still no dice . Over 180 year later and the mystery remained , until now .
A new study has retrace the deoxyribonucleic acid of this strange creature to in conclusion commit it on the evolutionary tree diagram . The enquiry , led by the University of Potsdam , was late published in the journalNature Communications .
The animate being in question isMacrauchenia patachonica , a mammalian that ’s believed to have gone extinct in South America between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago , when it abruptly disappeared from the fossil record . It ’s a long - make out , long - limbed mammal that looks a bit like a mash - up of a camel , a giraffe , and an elephant straight out of a fantasy picture for shaver . But despite these undefined similarities to well - know animate being , theM.patachonicadid not have any close living relatives , making its identification very crafty indeed .
This new project gathered bone samples collected across South America and extracted the mitochondrial desoxyribonucleic acid from its ancient collagen protein . The team discovered that it actually belongs to a descent that split fromPerissodactyla , an order of odd - toe ungulate that includes horses , rhinoceros , and tapir . The two chemical group are thought to have depart about 66 million years ago .
" We now have found a place in the tree of living for this group , so we can now also considerably explain how the peculiarities of these fauna germinate , " Michi Hofreiter , steer author and paleogenomics expert at the University of Potsdam , toldCNN .
Sequencing the DNA was no low exploit , however . DNA incline to put down over the yr , particularly if it ’s kept in a warm clime for thousands of years . The researchers effectively had to piece together the DNA from short sequences of familial cloth from numerous unlike individuals . This was made all the tougher because the brute has no close living relation for the research worker to “ fill in the missing spaces ” .
“ Paleontologists until modern days have been confused by these animals , " Hofreiter toldGizmodo . " Reconstructing a reliable episode from these short DNA segments with only distant congenator , that ’s a challenge . "
He added : “ A big matter to emphasize is there have been vast improvements in what people have been able to do with ancient deoxyribonucleic acid because of improvement to instrumentation and software program . ”
