Crosscut · 9 min
Discovering Hidden Species
Instead of digging up physical fossils, scientists are reading modern genetic code to uncover entirely new species, tracking down everything from unidentified insects buzzing around New York City to extinct ancestors hiding inside living humans.
Traces of Two Extinct 'Ghost' Ancestors Were Found Hiding in Modern Human DNA, Hinting at Our Extremely Complex Family Tree × We Think We Just Discovered Some New Species Living in New York City
Published 2026-08-15
0:00 / 9:00 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The connection
Finding an unknown creature usually conjures images of dusty bones pulled from the earth. But the frontier of biological discovery has shifted away from physical fossils and into the genetic code of organisms alive right now. A recent piece in Smithsonian Magazine shows researchers skipping the archaeological dig to find extinct ancestors. Instead, they are tracing ancient "ghost" populations by reading the DNA of living people. Meanwhile, Benji Jones writes in Vox about scientists scanning the genetic barcodes of insects buzzing around New York City to identify entirely new species. Putting these two approaches together reveals something surprising. The most mysterious creatures aren't always buried in ancient rock. Sometimes, they are hiding in plain sight.
Reading the genetic code of 500 living people, the Smithsonian piece leaves you with a strange image: the ghosts of extinct ancestors are still walking around inside the modern human body. You don't necessarily need to dig up a million-year-old bone to find a lost branch of the family tree. That shift—from digging in the dirt to reading the genes of the living—is exactly where Benji Jones picks up the thread. But instead of looking backward at human history, Jones looks outward at the modern city. He sets up a five-foot bug trap right in the middle of New York, catching thousands of flies and wasps. By reading their DNA barcodes, he realizes that entirely unknown species are likely buzzing around Central Park right now. Read alongside the Smithsonian article, Jones’s urban experiment changes how you might picture a biological frontier. The undiscovered world is simply hiding in plain sight, written into the DNA of the people waiting on a subway platform, and the insects flying past the streetlamps above them.
What lingers after these two stories is the image of an unmapped insect buzzing past a coffee shop, or an ancient ancestor hiding inside a modern drop of blood. The frontier of discovery has moved from dusty dig sites right into the middle of the city. The unknown isn't far away anymore. It's alive, and it's sharing the sidewalk. That leaves a quiet question to sit with. If so much history and wild biology are already hiding in plain sight, what else is waiting to be found right underfoot?