Museums hold most of the world’s most valuable biological specimens and tissues collected, including type
material that is often decades or even centuries old. Unfortunately, traditional museum collection and storage
methods were not designed to preserve the nucleic acids held within the material, often reducing its potential
viability and value for many genetic applications. High-throughput sequencing technologies and associated
applications offer new opportunities for obtaining sequence data from museum samples. In particular, target
sequence capture offers a promising approach for recovering large numbers of orthologous loci from relatively
small amounts of starting material.