Museum bones are becoming time capsules of ancient DNA
Modern geneticists are bypasssing brittle limbs to drill into the petrous bone, a skull fragment so dense it protects DNA like a biological safe.
For over a century, the skeletons in our natural history museums were valued only for their shape and size. Today, researchers are looking past the surface to treat these bones as hard drives containing the lost history of our species. By drilling into the petrous portion of the temporal bone—an incredibly dense structure near the inner ear—scientists can find up to 100 times more usable genetic material than in any other part of the skeleton. This stone-like bone is so compact that it effectively shields DNA from the heat and microbes that usually dissolve it over millennia.