
Ancient DNA: Past and Present
Come listen to researchers presenting their project and ask them your questions!

Understanding past and present biodiversity with DNA
DNA is transforming the way scientists monitor and survey of biodiversity, allowing to study animals without even touching them.
What can a shrimp or a sponge tell us about the fish that live around them? Can a bat inform us about the insect pests in a rice crop? How can we know which pollinators
visited the flowers in our garden? I will tell you some stories about how biologists use DNA to study animals from deep-sea shrimps to endangered newts to madagascar bats.
Sandra Garces-Pastor
Researcher, UiT

The hidden diversity of extinct megafauna
Ancient DNA is revolutionizing our understanding of prehistoric animals and how they lived. In this talk, I will give an overview of ancient DNA and how we recover useful information from it. I will then tell stories of what we have learned about two ice age animals: mammoths and horses. For the mammoths, I will show how we recovered the oldest-ever ancient DNA and used this to resolve the origins of mammoths in North America. I will then tell the story of how we use ancient DNA to solve the mystery of what the puzzling North American stilt-legged horses were.
Twitter:@PalaeoPete
Peter Heintzman
Associate Professor , UiT