Illustration by Peter Schouten/"Biggest, Fiercest, Strangest"/W. Norton Publishers 
 
 When Charles Darwin visited South America on HMS Beagle in the 1830s, he discovered fossils of several hefty mammals that defied classification, such as Macrauchenia, which looked like a humpless camel with a long snout; or Toxodon, with a rhino’s body, hippo’s head and rodent-like teeth — which he described as “perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered”. 
 
 Since Darwin's time, no-one has been able to work out where the bizarre beasts fit in the mammalian family tree1. But now, by analysing ancient collagen protein from 12,000-year-old fossils, researchers say that they have solved the puzzle. The scientists behind the work also think that ancient proteins could revolutionize the study of long-extinct species, revealing the secrets of fossils millions of years older than can be studied using DNA. 
 
 Part of a group of more than 250 mammals known as the South American ungulates, the creatures lived on the continent for around 60 million years before disappearing around 12,000 years ago. The confusion over their ancestry is partly due to a fragmentary fossil record, but also because researchers have had no luck isolating DNA from South American ungulate fossils; the molecule degrades quickly in the continent’s warm climate. 
 
 So Ian Barnes, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, teamed up with bioarchaeologist Matthew Collins at the University of York, UK, and an international team of researchers to try a different tactic: extracting collagen. The protein survives around ten times as long as DNA and is a major structural component of bone. “Compared to DNA, there’s absolutely tons of it,” Barnes says. 
 
 The team first built a collagen family tree, which laid out the collagen sequences of different mammals on the basis of their familial relationships. The researchers had to extract and sequence collagen from tapirs, hippos and aardvarks to build up their picture. With that in hand, they sequenced collagen from four ungulate specimens from two different museums in Argentina — two Toxodon specimens around 12,000 years old and two Macrauchenia that could not be carbon-dated — and compared the ancient proteins against their tree. 
 
 South American ungulates were recently suggested — on the basis of their fossils — to be part of the group Afrotheria, along with elephants and manatees1. But the protein sequences, reported in this week’s Nature, revealed that the museum specimens are most closely related to Perissodactyla, a group that includes horses, tapirs and rhinos2. 
 
 The study is “a big step forward”, says Rob Asher, a palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who was not part of the research team. Biologists can now start to tease out how the fossils’ physical traits evolved, he says. 
 
 The ancient protein revolution 
 
 But the researchers who took part in the study say that this is just the start. Ancient proteins could now prove as revolutionary as DNA for studying the tree of life, “but with the possibility of reaching much further back in time”, they write. Modern instruments mean that researchers are now getting many times more information from ancient samples, says bioarchaeologist Collins: today's mass spectrometers can measure protein masses more accurately than before, and can collect and concentrate rare components within protein mixtures. 
 
 The oldest DNA recovered so far, from an ice core in Greenland, is 450,000–800,000 years old3. Proteins could reach back millions of years. In 2007, US researchers claimed to have sequenced collagen fragments from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur fossil4, but the result has proved controversial. Otherwise the oldest protein sequence recovered so far is from a camel that lived in the Arctic 3.2 million years ago5. “Certainly 4 million years will not be a problem,” says Collins. “In cold places, maybe up to 20 million years.” 
 
 Proteins could also be useful for studying extinct species that lived more recently in hotter environments where DNA studies are difficult: what Collins describes as “weird and wonderful” animals around during the late Pleistocene, from the dwarf elephants and enormous rodents of the Indonesian island of Flores to Australia’s giant lizards and kangaroos. 
 
 Asher isn’t convinced that ancient proteins will be as revolutionary as DNA, but he describes the potential as “very exciting”. For species that have become extinct within the last few million years, he says, “this could really rock the boat”. ||||| Image received from the American Museum of Natural History shows an artist's impression of Macrauchenia patachonica, the creature Charles Darwin called the 'strangest animal ever discovered' (AFP Photo/Jorge Blanco) 
 
 Paris (AFP) - Charles Darwin, Mr. Evolution himself, didn't know what to make of the fossils he saw in Patagonia so he sent them to his friend, the renowned paleontologist Richard Owen. 
 
 Owen was stumped too. Little wonder. 
 
 "The bones looked different from anything he knew," said Michael Hofreiter, senior author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications that finally situates in the tree of life what Darwin called the "strangest animal ever discovered". 
 
 "Imagine a camel without a hump, with feet like a slender rhino, and a head shaped like a saiga antelope," Hofreiter, a professor at the University of Potsdam, told AFP. 
 
 Macrauchenia patachonica -- literally, "long-necked llama" -- also had a long rubbery snout and with its nostrils high on the skull just above its eyes. 
 
 For nearly two centuries, biologists and taxonomists argued over the pedigree of this bizarre beast, which weighed 400 to 500 kilos (850 to 1100 pounds), lived in open landscapes, and snacked on grass and leaves. 
 
 But its mixed bag of body features, and a paucity of DNA evidence, made it nearly impossible to determine whether M. patachonica was truly related the llama after which it was named. 
 
 As it turns out, not really. 
 
 - Evolutionary dead end - 
 
 A new kind of genetic analysis revealed that Macrauchenia was more akin to an ancient placental order known as Perissodactyla that includes horses, rhinos and tapirs. 
 
 "We had a difficult problem to solve here," said lead author of the new study Michael Westbury, also at the University of Potsdam. 
 
 "When ancient DNA is so degraded and full of unwanted environmental DNA, we rely on being able to use the genomes of close relatives as a kind of scaffold to reconstruct fossil sequences," he said in a statement. 
 
 But Macrauchenia -- itself an evolutionary dead end -- didn't have any close cousins that we know of. 
 
 To solve the puzzle, Westbury and a 20-strong team of scientists used mitochondrial DNA extracted from a fossil found in southern Chile to decode the extinct mammal's origins. 
 
 Inherited from the mother alone, the mitochondrial genome is smaller and has more copies in the cell -- and thus in fossils -- than DNA from the more complex nuclear genome, Hofreiter explained. 
 
 "Mitochondrial DNA is very useful for evaluating the degree of relatedness among species," he said. 
 
 The team eventually pieced together almost 80 percent of the total genome, making it possible to situate Macrauchenia in an evolutionary timeline. 
 
 The creature's lineage, they concluded, split with that of modern perissodactyls some 66 million years ago, about the same time a massive asteroid slammed into Earth and wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. 
 
 Macrauchenia survived until the late Pleistocene, 20,000 to 11,000 years ago. 
 
 "Why it disappeared we really don't know -- it is still an open question whether it was humans, climate change, or a combination of the two," said Hofreiter.
– A humpless, snouted camel? Check. A rhino with the teeth of a rodent and head of a hippo? No problem, scientists say, after apparently figuring out, finally, where these mystery creatures sit on the mammalian family tree, Nature reports. Charles Darwin discovered fossils of these ancient creatures while visiting South America in the 1830s, but failed to classify them (and called the rhino-like animal "perhaps one of the strangest" ever discovered). Scientists continued to have no luck placing the mammals—which flourished for 60 million years and vanished around 10,000BC—in part because the fossils' DNA degraded too fast in the warm climate of South America. Now two British researchers have taken a different route, by extracting collagen protein from the fossils. "Compared to DNA, there’s absolutely tons of it," says one of the scientists, Ian Barnes. First they created a "collagen family tree," using the protein to figure out other animals' familial relationships. Then they sequenced collagen from specimens of the rhino-ish Toxodon and camel-like Macrauchenia sitting in Argentinian museums. Turns out the hoofed mammals that baffled Darwin are part of the Perissodactyla group, which includes rhinos, tapirs, and horses, the researchers say. So why care, unless you're a Darwin enthusiast? Because this method can be used to analyze other creatures going back millions of years—much further than DNA. "DNA sequencing is changing, but protein sequencing is undergoing a similar revolution in the sensitivity of the instruments," Barnes tells National Geographic. "Who's to say what we can do?" (A fascist warrior-poet's DNA was recently reconstructed with help from a "love hanky.")