Diverse animals as hedgehogs, bats, horses, cows, and dogs all evolved from a common ancestor, which lived about 80 million years ago. All of them originated on the northern supercontinent of Laurasia and form the group of Laurasiatheria. As part of her PhD thesis, MGSE Alumni Liliya Doronina and researchers from the team of MGSE PI Jürgen Schmitz at the Medical Faculty, together with Russian and American colleagues, investigated the genomes of laurasiatherian animals from a new perspective by applying exhaustive analyses of retroposed elements in the genomes of the bat, horse, cow, and dog. Their results significantly support the network-character of laurasiatherian phylogenetic relationships. However, using newly developed statistical tests for analyzing retroposon data in such complex animal groups, they found some relationships among orders within this network: Among the other laurasiatherians, bats were the next group that evolved enough to be separated after hedgehogs, and, surprisingly, horses probably appeared due to a fusion of the bats’ ancestor and the ancestor of dogs and cows. The findings have been published in Genome Research: Doronina L, Churakov G, Kuritzin A, Shi J, Baertsch R, Clawson H & Schmitz J (2017) Speciation network in laurasiatheria: Retrophylogenomic signals. Genome Research. 10.1101/gr.210948.116 [doi]. The press release of the Medical Faculty can be found here.