Research overview: museum genomics of felids

Natural history museum collections preserve specimens spanning centuries, providing a genetic archive of felid populations as they existed before recent declines. This overview surveys how museum genomics extracts DNA from skins, skulls, and bones to compare historical and modern diversity, reconstruct lost populations such as the Barbary lion or Caspian tiger, and detect changes in genetic load over time. It discusses the technical challenges of degraded museum DNA, the ethical and curatorial considerations of sampling irreplaceable specimens, and how time-series genetic data illuminate how bottlenecks, fragmentation, and extinction have reshaped cat populations within historical memory. By providing a genetic baseline from before recent declines, museum specimens let researchers measure exactly how much diversity threatened cats have lost and which lineages have disappeared entirely.