On Jun. 26, 2013 researchers at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark announced a complete genome sequence was generated from the bone of a horse that lived roughly 700,000 years ago.

The researchers performed sequencing with the Helicos platform, a third-generation tool that enabled single-molecule sequencing without previous amplification, thereby reducing risk of contamination and increasing access to small fragment of endogenous DNA. The study was published in Nature.