June 26, 2013 — According to an article on the Nature.com website, new DNA research on a horse fossil has shown that, “the ancient ancestor of the modern Equus genus, which includes horses, donkeys and zebras, branched off from other animal lineages about 4 million years ago–twice as long ago as scientists had previously thought.”

This research also was noted as being the oldest full genome sequence of any species, according to the Nature.com article.

The ancient genome–thought to be from a horse that lived 780,000 and 560,000 years ago–was compared to another ancient horse fossil-derived genome, modern horses, a donkey and a Przewalski’s Horse.

The research was conducted at the University of Copenhagen.

For more information about this article, visit the Nature.com website.