Bacteria samples collected in Antarctica a century ago nearly identical to present day samples

(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers with the Natural History Museum of London and the University of Waikato have found that bacteria living in a part of Antarctica have not changed much over the past century. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Anne Jungblut and Ian Hawes describe how they compared the DNA of cynobacterial mats collected during Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery Expedition from 1901 to 1904 with modern specimens and what they found.