“…The advent of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, nearly 30 years ago, was key in enabling researchers to obtain genetic data from museum samples and to produce more thorough genetic or phylogenetic hypotheses by increasing population or taxon sampling, sometimes using specimens of long-extinct species (e.g. Shapiro et al, 2002;Warren et al, 2006;Johnson et al, 2010;Shepherd et al, 2012;Heupink, van Grouw & Lambert, 2014). Museum specimens have therefore contributed to the description of many specific evolutionary and biogeographic patterns, such as, for example, the recent intercontinental spread of cultivated plants (Ames & Spooner, 2008;Schaefer & Renner, 2010), the evolution of extant and extinct ruminants (Decker et al, 2009), or the origin of the dodo (Shapiro et al, 2002).…”