Ludovic Orlando and Revising the Recent Evolutionary History of Equids using Ancient DNA

Ludovic Orlando

For my letter to a biologist, I have chosen to write to Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando. He is a research lecturer at the Natural History Museum of Denmark's Centre for GeoGenetics, located in Copenhagen. He also supervises a team that is developing bioinformatic tools to study biogeographical ancestry. The research paper that I chose is titled "Revising the Recent Evolutionary History of Equids using Ancient DNA". It has about twenty authors, so I chose the first listed since that is usually the team leader.

The research paper describes the process of using phylogenetic analysis to gain insight to the reasoning behind unexpected evolutionary patterns that have been discovered in ancient equids. The team studied 35 ancient specimens from South America, Southwest Asia, South Africa and Europe. Their discoveries revealed the need for major revisions to many taxonomic levels surrounding the evolution of Equus. Not only that, but the researchers also discovered two new species of equids and revised the extinction times for others.

I have a couple of questions for Mr. Orlando. For one, it would be interesting to learn more about the process of discovering a new species. Also, I'd like to ask what countries and fields the other researchers worked and lived in. I'm curious to know what it is like to work with people from all over the world and would also like to know what language that they communicated in. They used mitochondrial sequences to come to a lot of these conclusions and I'd be interested in knowing a little bit more about how that is conducted. Finally, I will ask him a little bit more about himself. I'd like to know how he became interested in this field of study and what colleges/universities he attended.

Stay tuned for more on Ludovic and his adventures!