According to Michi Hofreiter, primary author and paleogenomics expert at the University of Potsdam, “We now have found a place in the tree of life for this group, so we can now also better explain how the peculiarities of these animals evolved”.
The task of sequencing the DNA of the creature was quite the achievement. This is because DNA has a tendency to deteriorate over time, particularly when it is kept in a warm climate for thousands of years.
The researchers had to reconstruct the DNA from short sequences of genetic data from various individuals. The process was made more difficult give that the animal does not have a living relations.
Hofreiter states, “Paleontologists until modern days have been confused by these animals […] Reconstructing a reliable sequence from these short DNA segments with only distant relatives, that’s a challenge”. He explains that these findings were made possible because of improvements to instrumentation and software.