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Allison Q. Byrne and colleagues relied on historical DNA (hDNA)—genomic data incidentally preserved in specimens housed in collections such as those at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History—to investigate the evolutionary origins of a pathogen affecting amphibians. Although this approach can yield many insights about the biological past, it remains a relatively underutilized resource in part because hDNA is often to some extent degraded, a situation not easily remediable under current methodological paradigms and with extant DNA extraction and analysis technologies.