Enlarge / During the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the city's African American Greenwood district was destroyed by white rioters. (credit: Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The mob had gathered after the arrest of a Black teenager named Dick Rowland, who had been falsely accused of assaulting a white girl in an elevator. In one of the worst episodes of racial violence in US history, thousands of white vigilantes took to the streets of Greenwood with torches, guns, and bombs.

In a matter of hours, the rioters destroyed more than a thousand homes and hundreds of businesses across 35 blocks of the Greenwood district—so prosperous it was called “Black Wall Street.” Historians estimate that dozens to as many as 300 Black people were killed during the massacre. Some are believed to have been buried in unmarked graves. In 2020, the city of Tulsa finally began excavations to search for those graves. So far, archaeologists have exhumed 19 sets of human remains at a local cemetery that may be linked to the massacre.

Now, scientists working for the city have obtained enough usable DNA from two individuals to potentially learn their identities. The researchers say genetic material from these two people’s living descendants could help identify the nameless victims. “These people deserve their names. They deserve to be identified. Their families deserve to know who they are,” says Danny Hellwig, director of laboratory development for Intermountain Forensics, a nonprofit laboratory based in Utah hired by Tulsa officials to do the DNA analysis.

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons )

Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the Earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that we have photographs and film clips of the last thylacines ending their days in zoos. Late enough that in just a few decades, countries would start writing laws to prevent other species from seeing the same fate.

On Tuesday, a company called Colossal, which has already said it wants to bring the mammoth back, is announcing a partnership with an Australian lab that it says will de-extinct the thylacine with the goal of re-introducing it into the wild. A number of features of marsupial biology make this a more realistic goal than the mammoth, although there's still a lot of work to do before we even start the debate about whether reintroducing the species is a good idea.

To find out more about the company's plans for the thylacine, we had a conversation with Colossal's founder, Ben Lamm, and the head of the lab he's partnering with, Andrew Pask.

Enlarge / Alpine chipmunks collected by pioneering naturalist Joseph Grinnell in the early 20th century are still preserved at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. Recently, geneticists used DNA extracted from them to trace how the chipmunks have evolved. Museum collections like this can give researchers at time machine to the past. ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) (credit: KQED Quest )

Natural history’s golden age, when Charles Darwin and like-minded scientists pondered connections between creatures and their environments, largely revolved around collecting stuff. Explorers fanned out across the world and picked up as many plants and animals as they could, drying them or stuffing them or storing them in alcohol in small glass jars. They carried them home to grand museums where the public might get a peek at them and be amazed.

These venerable collections can seem like relics today—musty storehouses, shrines to imperial plunder. But with billions of samples catalogued among them, museum collections are a treasure for modern evolutionary biologists studying DNA, RNA, proteins and other biomolecules. Sampling decades- or even centuries-old tissues allows scientists to capture snippets of genetic code from plants and animals—including extinct ones—and track molecular changes that took place long before biologists even understood what DNA was. Younger specimens are valuable too, providing a large sampling to help scientists compare traits within a species or between related ones.

All of this makes working with museum samples a tantalizing prospect for researchers, says Harvard evolutionary geneticist Daren Card, who has sequenced specimens from Australian museums for his own work on limb development in reptiles. Museum genomics is delivering crucial insights into evolutionary history, the effects of climate change and more, Card and colleagues write in the 2021 Annual Review of Genetics . Knowable spoke with Card about some of these projects—and some challenges the field faces.