From Past to Present

It was the year 2002 and I was sitting in the shiny new office of our Biogeography Professor for my oral Diploma exam. It was going well, when I was asked to name an example of a Gondwanan distribution pattern, or in other words a species or group of species whose present-day distribution goes back to the ancient Gondwanan supercontinent … Read More

Earlier this week, my colleague Neil Gemmell released the results from his year-long hunt for the Loch Ness monster. As expected, the story attracted enormous media attention. Also, as expected, it attracted some criticism from fellow scientists pointing out how unnecessary it is to conduct such a large-scale experiment to find something that every sane person and certainly every … Read More

Last week the discovery of a lower jaw bone of a Denisovan hit the headlines all over the world. Denisovans are a now-extinct species of humans that were closely related to us as well as to Neanderthals. To an outside observer, the excitement of researchers about this find might have appeared a bit over the top. After all, Denisovans have … Read More

Fourteen years ago, I was a PhD student somewhere half-way through my degree and had just published my first paper. As I proudly flicked through the hard copy of the journal, I noticed another article that caught my interest. Using DNA extracted from ancient bones, an international team lead by researchers from Oxford University and Palaecol Research in … Read More

Recently, our team at the University of Otago embarked on a quest to identify how and when Tuberculosis (TB) reached New Zealand, by looking for the genetic signature of Tuberculosis bacteria in ancient human and animal remains from across the country. Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease which has been called a “global health emergency” by the World Health Organization, killing … Read More