The burgeoning field of "museomics".

• Position: SCIENCE SCENE - Brief article

The burgeoning field of "museomics"--using improved methods for sampling DNA combined with the latest sequencing technology to analyze preserved museum samples--has set to work on studying the thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, reports a team of international researchers that includes scientists from Penn State and Texas A&M universities. In 1902, the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., arranged to have the unique and endangered thylacines (a female and her three cubs) brought to the U.S. from Tasmania. By the mid 1930s, the species was extinct. Thylacine actually was not a tiger...