About 25,000 years ago in Western Europe, the last cave bear drew its final breath and the species went extinct. But a study published on Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution finds that some cave bear DNA lives on in modern brown bears, much like humans carry around a bit of Neanderthal. “Extinction does not imply that genetic material is gone forever,” he said via email. In the new study, researchers initially set out to learn more about the cave bear by studying its genetics. Almost as a lark they compared the genetic sequence they’d derived for the cave bear with an existing sequence of a brown bear, said Axel Barlow, the lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Source: New York Times August 27, 2018 16:07 UTC