This is a guest post from a member of Science in the News (SITN), an organization of PhD students at Harvard University whose mission is to bring the newest and most relevant science to a general audience. For over a decade, SITN has been presenting a fall lecture series at Harvard Medical School, with talks on a diversity of current and newsworthy topics, such as stem cell biology and climate change. SITN also publishes the Flash, an online newsletter written by graduate students at Harvard, which presents current scientific discoveries and emerging fields in an accessible and entertaining manner. SITN engages in additional outreach activities such as "Science by the Pint", and hopes students at other institutions will also make the commitment to strengthen science communication. The following post is from Harvard graduate student Amanda Nottke. How Do We Identify Extinct Species? Paleontologists have always differentiated between extinct species by comparative anatomy of their fossil remains. Those scientists who study living organisms have an additional technique available – the comparison of DNA sequences between specimens. More recently, due to rapid advances in the efficiency and reduced cost of DNA sequencing, it has become possible to sequence DNA extracted from the remains ...