Humans like to think we have a monopoly on understanding ourselves — that explanations for all our inner workings, including when things go awry, lie within our genetic code.
We might like to think that, but we’re wrong. Whether it’s the diminutive bumblebee bat, the lightning-fast cheetah or even a lumbering hippo, mammals hold important clues to what makes us tick.
That’s the message of a massive data release from a project called Zoonomia, in which some 100 scientists at dozens of institutions spent over a decade collecting, sequencing and analyzing the genomes of 239 mammals (and one human thrown in for comparison). The ambitious work makes clear that animals have a lot to teach us about the more mysterious parts of our own genomes.