In 1925, a handsome male sled dog named Balto led a 13-dog team that braved blizzard conditions during the grueling final 53-mile (85-km) leg of a 674-mile (1,088-km) dogsled relay, bringing lifesaving medicine to the Alaskan city of Nome during a diphtheria outbreak.
Balto was feted as a hero, the subject of books and movies, and the dog's taxidermy mount still stands on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But that was not the end of Balto's magnificent deeds. Scientists have extracted DNA from a piece of Balto's underbelly skin from the well-preserved museum mount and sequenced the dog's genome as part of an ambitious comparative mammalian genomic research project called Zoonomia.
