Beth Shapiro

He sold one animal.

to a farmer in Canada for $2.5 million, 1975.

It's still the most expensive single animal that has ever been sold, right?

$2.5 million, 1975 for this animal.

And so we have this thing.

I was like, we're going to sample them.

We were working with collaborators from the USDA.

We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranches and saying, can we have a piece of your pieces, some of your stuff?

And they were like, not sure about research on this.

And so we started buying tongues because if you buy steak, you just get the same animal over and over again, but they all have one tongue.

So you can just buy tongues and then you get lots of different animals.

We sequenced their genomes.

And then we got from the USDA their expired sperm straws that they have for the animals that they give away to start your beef.

I think we sequenced their genomes as well, including...

this $2.5 million 1975 individual.

And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last 30 years of my life.

And so we have this big plot that shows bison on one side and cattle on the other.

And we had made a hybrid so we could sequence their genomes.

He wasn't born.

It was an aborted animal because it's very hard to make a hybrid.