A mysterious spiraling blue light illuminated the night skies over Europe on Monday.

The cosmic whirlpool was captured in stunning video and appears to have been created by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster falling back toward Earth, according to experts.

Time-lapse video taken from Croatia at around 4 p.m. EST, or 9 p.m. local time, shows the glowing light spinning across the sky in what many social media commentators likened to a spiral galaxy. The full video at normal speed lasts for about six minutes.

Many social media commenters likened the stunning display to a spiral galaxy (MedicaChristian/TMX)

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The Met Office in the U.K. said it had received many reports of an “illuminated swirl in the sky” and said it was likely caused by the Space X rocket which launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at around 1:50 p.m. EST as part of the government’s classified NROL-69 mission. The Elon Musk-owned SpaceX was launching a payload on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the government’s intelligence and surveillance agency.

“This is likely to be caused by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launched earlier today,” the Met Office wrote on X. “The rocket’s frozen exhaust plume appears to be spinning in the atmosphere and reflecting the sunlight, causing it to appear as a spiral in the sky.”

The glowing light is an example of what some people call a “SpaceX spiral,” according to Space.com.

A mysterious spiraling blue light likely caused by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket illuminated the night skies over Europe on Monday. (MedicaChristian/TMX)

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SpaceX spirals develop after the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket separates from its first-stage booster. As the upper stage continues towards space, the lower stage falls, spiraling back to Earth, dumping what remains of its fuel. 

The fuel then freezes instantly due to its high altitude and light then reflects on it, creating the strange-looking glow in the sky, per the outlet.  

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on March 14, 2025. (SpaceX/NASA)

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Fox News Digital reached out to SpaceX for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

Monday’s cosmic display came just days after a SpaceX team working with NASA returned two stranded astronauts from space. 

Warning: This article contains graphic pictures. Reader discretion is advised.

Stunning pictures show a female baby mammoth, dating back over 130,000 years, recently being dissected by Russian scientists.

The mammoth, which has been nicknamed “Yana,” was dissected at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia, on March 27. The baby mammoth had been preserved in permafrost until she was dug up in the cold Russian province of Yakutia last year.

Pictures of the necropsy show a team of scientists huddled around the 397-pound animal, which closely resembles a modern baby elephant. The creature’s mouth was open, and her trunk was curled as scientists opened up her skin.

Scientists initially believed that Yana lived 50,000 years ago, but that estimate was updated to over 130,000 years after scientists analyzed the permafrost layer where she was found.

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A live broadcast of scientists performing a necropsy on the 50,000-year-old baby mammoth nicknamed “Yana” is seen on a screen at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk on March 27, 2025. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

Maxim Cherpasov, head of the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory, told Reuters last year that the mammoth was just over a year old when she died. The corpse was already partially eaten by predators when she was discovered.

“As a rule, the part that thaws out first, especially the trunk, is often eaten by modern predators or birds,” Cherpasov told Reuters.

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Scientists perform a necropsy on the 50,000-year-old baby mammoth nicknamed “Yana” at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk on March 27, 2025. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

“Here, for example, even though the forelimbs have already been eaten, the head is remarkably well-preserved.”

Though the discovery of a well-preserved mammoth is exceedingly rare, it is not unheard of for other mammoth remains to be discovered. In June 2024, a fisherman found a mammoth bone on the banks of the Raba River in Książnice, near Gdów, Poland.

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Scientists perform a necropsy on the 50,000-year-old baby mammoth nicknamed “Yana” at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk on March 27, 2025. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

In August of the same year, a fossil collector discovered a portion of a Columbian mammoth tusk in an embankment in Madison County, Mississippi.

Reuters contributed to this report.

A Dallas-based company claims to have brought back wolves that last roamed the Earth more than 12,500 years ago and became widely known due to the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones.”

Colossal Biosciences says it rebirthed three dire wolves using genome-editing and cloning technologies in what it says is now the world’s first successful “de-extincted animal,” although one expert believes the company merely genetically modified a wolf as opposed to bringing the apex predator back from extinction. 

Dire wolves roamed the American midcontinent during the Ice Age and the oldest confirmed dire wolf fossil is 250,000 years old from Black Hills, South Dakota, according to Colossal Biosciences. In Game of Thrones, the wolves are bigger and smarter than normal wolves and fiercely loyal to their Starks, the most important noble family in the series. 

A Dallas-based company claims to have brought back wolves that last roamed the Earth more than 12,500 years ago and became widely known due to the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones.” (Colossal Biosciences )

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The three litters of Colossal’s dire wolves include two adolescent males called Romulus and Remus, and one female puppy named Khaleesi.

The scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used “CRISPR” technology, short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” to genetically modify them in 20 different sites, according typo Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist. These changes gave the pups traits like larger bodies and longer, fuller, light-colored fur, traits believed to have helped dire wolves survive cold climates during the Ice Age.

The 20 genome edits were made to replicate the dire wolf’s ancient DNA, with 15 of those edits matching genes found in actual dire wolves. 

The ancient DNA was extracted from two dire wolf fossils: a tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, that is around 13,000 years old, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, around 72,000 years old.

They transferred the genetic material to an egg cell from a domestic dog. When ready, the embryos were transferred to surrogates, also domestic dogs, and 62 days later the genetically engineered pups were born.

Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, said that it was a massive milestone and the first of many upcoming examples demonstrating that the company’s end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works.

“It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’” Lamm said. “Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”

Scientists used genome-editing and cloning technologies to rebirth the wolves. (Colossal Biosciences )

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Colossal has previously announced similar projects to genetically alter cells from living species to create animals resembling extinct wooly mammoths, dodos and others.

During this week’s announcement, the company announced it had birthed two litters of cloned red wolves, the most critically endangered wolf in the world, using a new approach to non-invasive blood cloning. 

The birth of red wolves, the company said, provides evidence it can conserve animals through de-extinction technology.

Lamm said the team met with officials from the Interior Department in late March about the project, while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum praised the work on X on Monday as a “thrilling new era of scientific wonder” even as outside scientists said there are limitations to restoring the past.

A dire wolf at 5 months old. (Colossal Biosciences )

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Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University in Australia, poured cold water on the claims that the company had brought the dire wolf back from extinction.

“So yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe, and that’s probably the best that you’re going to get,” Bradshaw said. “And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified gray wolf? Yes. And that’s probably about it.”

Colossal Biosciences said the wolves are now thriving in a 2,000-acre secure expansive ecological preserve in Texas that is certified by the American Humane Society and registered with USDA. Long term, Colossal plans to restore the species in secure and expansive ecological preserves, potentially on indigenous land.

Cracking the dolphin code.

Dolphins are one of the smartest animals on Earth and have been revered for thousands of years for their intelligence, emotions and social interaction with humans.

Now Google is using artificial intelligence (AI) to try and understand how they communicate with one another – with the hope that one day humans could use the technology to chat with the friendly finned mammals.

Google has teamed up with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), a Florida-based non-profit which has been studying and recording dolphin sounds for 40 years, to build the new AI model called DolphinGemma.

Google is using artificial intelligence (AI) to try and understand how dolphins communicate with one another – with the hope that one day humans could use the technology to chat with them. (iStock)

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For decades, WDP has correlated sound types with behavioral contexts. For instance, signature whistles have been used by mothers and calves to reunite, while burst pulse “squawks” are often observed during dolphin fights, researchers said, according to a Google blog on the project.

Click “buzzes” are often used during courtship or chasing sharks.

Now, using the vast data gathered by WDP, Google has built DolphinGemma, building upon Google’s own AI lightweight open model, known as Gemma.

DolphinGemma has been trained to analyze the vast library of recordings to detect patterns, structures, and even potential “meanings” behind the dolphin communications or vocalizations. 

Over time, DolphinGemma will try to organize the dolphin sounds into categories — almost like words, sentences, or expressions in human language.

Google has teamed up with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), a Florida-based non-profit which has been studying and recording dolphin sounds for 40 years, to build the new AI model called DolphinGemma.

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“By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins’ natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort,” a post on Google about the project reads.

“Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication.”

DolphinGemma uses Google’s Pixel phone technology, specifically the audio recording technology used in Pixel devices, to make clean, high-quality sound recordings of dolphin vocalizations.

The Pixel phone technology can separate out dolphin clicks and whistles from background noise like waves, boat engines, or underwater static. That clean audio is critical for AI models like DolphinGemma, because messy, noisy data would confuse the AI, researchers said.

A zookeeper wearing a protective mask looks inside the mouth of a dolphin at the zoologic park “Planete Sauvage” in Saint-Pere-en-Retz, outside Nantes, on May 6, 2020. Dolphins are one of the smartest animals on Earth and have been revered for thousands of years for their intelligence, emotions and social interaction with humans. (LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images)

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Google says it plans to release DolphinGemma as an open model this summer, allowing researchers around the world to use and adapt it.

Although it’s trained on Atlantic spotted dolphins, the model could also help study other species like bottlenose or spinner dolphins with some fine-tuning, researchers said. 

“By providing tools like DolphinGemma, we hope to give researchers worldwide the tools to mine their own acoustic datasets, accelerate the search for patterns and collectively deepen our understanding of these intelligent marine mammals,” the blog post reads. 

A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday, more than a half-century after its failed launch to Venus.

The European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking confirmed its uncontrolled reentry, based on analysis and no-shows of the spacecraft on subsequent orbits. The European Space Agency’s space debris office also indicated that the spacecraft had reentered after it failed to appear over a German radar station.

It was not immediately known where the spacecraft came in or how much, if any, of the half-ton spacecraft survived the fiery descent from orbit. Experts said ahead of time that some if not all of it might come crashing down, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus, the solar system’s hottest planet.

This photo provided by researcher Jane Greaves shows the planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Akatsuki probe in May 2016.  ((J. Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP)

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The chances of anyone getting clobbered by spacecraft debris were exceedingly low, scientists said.

Launched in 1972 by the Soviet Union, the spacecraft known as Kosmos 482 was part of a series of missions bound for Venus. But this one never made it out of orbit around Earth, stranded there by a rocket malfunction.

Much of the spacecraft came tumbling back to Earth within a decade of the failed launch. No longer able to resist gravity’s tug as its orbit dwindled, the spherical lander — an estimated 3 feet (1 meter) across — was the last part of the spacecraft to come down. The lander was encased in titanium, according to experts, and weighed more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms).

The US Space Command has yet to confirm the spacecraft’s whereabouts.

After following the spacecraft’s downward spiral, scientists, military experts and others could not pinpoint in advance precisely when or where the spacecraft might come down. 

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Solar activity added to the uncertainty as well as the spacecraft’s deteriorating condition after so long in space.

As of Saturday morning, the U.S. Space Command had yet to confirm the spacecraft’s demise as it collected and analyzed data from orbit.

The U.S. Space Command routinely monitors dozens of reentries each month. What set Kosmos 482 apart — and earned it extra attention from government and private space trackers — was that it was more likely to survive reentry, according to officials.

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It was also coming in uncontrolled, without any intervention by flight controllers who normally target the Pacific and other vast expanses of water for old satellites and other space debris.

An underwater volcano off the Oregon coast could erupt late this year, scientists say. 

The volcano, known as Axial Seamount, is more than 4,900 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean and 300 miles off the Oregon coast, but it is showing signs it will soon erupt for the first time since 2015.

The volcano is formed by a hot spot, an area in the Earth’s mantle where hot plumes of molten material rise upward into the crust, the University of Washington’s College of the Environment said in an April blog post. As the crust moves over the top of the mantle, the hot spot stays put, which results in long chains of volcanoes over time.

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The Regional Cabled Array spans the entire Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, from the Oregon coast to the summit of Axial Seamount 300 miles offshore. (Ocean Observation Initiative via University of Washington )

“Over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface was formed by volcanic eruptions at these mid-ocean ridges,” said Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist and dean of the university’s College of the Environment. “Axial Seamount is a direct result of these fundamental processes that continue to shape our planet today.”

The eruption doesn’t pose a danger, scientists said. 

“Axial Seamount is much too deep and far from shore for people on land to even notice when it erupts. An eruption at Axial Seamount also has nothing to do with seismic activity on land, so Pacific Northwesterners don’t need to worry about this event triggering a major earthquake or tsunami,” the blog post states. 

The first sign of an eruption at the volcano will be a sharp increase in the number of earthquakes around it, the post states. 

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Microbes and their waste material stream from this “snowblower” vent on Axial Seamount three months after its eruption in 2011. (Ocean Observatories Initiative via the University of Washington )

“The volcano has already surpassed the inflation we observed in 2015, but the earthquake activity is still quite low,” said Deborah Kelley, a professor at the UW School of Oceanography and director of the Regional Cabled Array. “We’re seeing 200 to 300 earthquakes per day, with some spikes around 1,000 per day due to the tides. If what we learned in 2015 is correct, I would expect to see more than 2,000 per day for a few months before the eruption.”

The quakes will be caused by magma moving toward the surface, the post states.

Earthquake activity at Axial Seamount spikes at low tide. (Ocean Observatories Initiative via the University of Washington )

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“That period lasts about an hour, and then the magma reaches the surface,” said William Wilcock, a professor at the UW School of Oceanography. “Lava flows spread across the caldera, and lava-filled fissures open up to the north or the south, reaching as far as 40 kilometers (about 25 miles). 

“The seismic activity dies down pretty quickly over the next few days, but the eruption will continue slowly for about a month.” 

Oceans around the globe have become darker over the last two decades, leaving researchers fearful for their marine inhabitants, according to a new study.

Professor Thomas Davies of the University of Plymouth said in a study published in the Global Change Biology journal there is growing concern for the marine ecosystem.

Satellite data from NASA’s Ocean Color Web data portal showed 21% of the planet’s oceans had darkened between 2003 and 2022.

According to Davies, the majority of marine life lives in the photic zones of the ocean, which is where sufficient light penetrates to stimulate photobiological processes.

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Oceans around the world have grown darker over the last two decades, leaving researchers fearful about marine inhabitants, a new study claims. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis, File)

The photic zone, which is 200 meters deep, is where global nutrients and carbon budgets sustain the planetary fish markets.

This is the area where light reaches marine life that lives closer to the surface of the ocean.

These ocean inhabitants rely on both the moonlight and sunlight for hunting, mating, reproduction and other important milestones.

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The darkening of the ocean could affect marine life around the world, a new study says. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

The upper level of the ocean is where microscopic organisms and different types of plankton live.

With the oceans beginning to darken, it will cause creatures that rely on light to begin moving closer to the surface, potentially creating a cramped living space.

Using satellite data and an algorithm-derived measure of the attenuation of light in seawater, Davis was able to measure how deep each photic zone was around the world.

Among the darker oceans, 9% of their photic zones were 50 meters more shallow, and 3% of the oceans’ photic zones were 100 meters more shallow.

Darker oceans could prompt marine life to move closer to the surface, resulting in a cramped living space, according to the study. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

The reasoning behind the darkening of oceans far offshore is less clear.

Global warming and changes in ocean currents are thought to be involved in this phenomenon, according to the study.

Despite an overall darkening, about 10% of oceans, or 37 million square kilometers, have become lighter over the past 20 years, the study found.

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It also found that most coastal areas have seen an increase in light. However, the study found that this does not translate into a net reduction in photic zone depth near shorelines.

Davies predicts the implications of ocean darkening could be severe for marine food webs, global fisheries and carbon and nutrient budgets.

Nick Butler is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Do you have any tips? Reach out to Nick.Butler@Fox.com.

A team of scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Natural Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey, might have found a new dwarf planet, potentially leading to more evidence of a theoretical super-planet.

The scientists announced in a news release that they have found a trans-Neptune Object(TNO), code-named 2017OF201, located past the icy and desolate region of the Kuplier Belt.

The TNO, which are described as minor planets that orbit the sun at a greater distance than Neptune, were found on the edge of our solar system.

While there are plenty of other TNOs in the solar system, what makes 2017OF201 special is its large size and extreme orbit.

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A team of scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences in Princeton might have found a new dwarf planet, potentially leading to more evidence of a theoretical super-planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech; image of 2017 OF201: Sihao Cheng et al.)

One of the team leads, Sihao Cheng, along with Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, made the discovery.

The team used advanced computational methods to identify the object’s distinctive trajectory pattern in the sky.

“The object’s aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” Cheng said in the release. “Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the Sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto’s orbit.”

2017OF201 takes about 25,000 years to orbit the sun, making Yang suggest that “It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit.”

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The solar system is made up of the sun, eight planets, 138 moons and many comets, asteroids and other space rocks. (NASA)

Cheng also added that there may have been more than one step in its migration. 

“It’s possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back,” Cheng said.

This discovery has significant implications for the current understanding of the layout of our outer solar system. 

According to NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 announced research that provided evidence for a planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth in the outer solar system.

However, the existence of Planet X or Planet Nine is strictly theoretical as neither astronomer has actually observed such a planet.

“Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system,” Cheng said. (Reuters/ESA/Hubble & NASA/Handout via Reuters)

The theory puts the planet at around the same size as Neptune, far past Pluto somewhere near the Kuiper Belt, where 2017OF201 was located. 

If it exists, it is theorized to have a mass of up to 10 times as much as Earth’s with a distance of up to 30 times further than Neptune to the Sun.

It would take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the Sun.

However, the area beyond the Kuiper Belt, where the object is located, had previously been thought to be essentially empty, but the team’s discovery suggests that this is not so. 

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Cheng said in the release that 2017OF201 only has about 1% of its orbit visible to us.

“Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system,” Cheng said.

NASA mentioned that if Planet Nine exists, it could help explain the unique orbits of some smaller objects in the distant Kuiper Belt.

As of now, Planet Nine remains all but a theory, but the existence of this far-off world rests on gravitational patterns in the outer solar system.

Nick Butler is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Do you have any tips? Reach out to Nick.Butler@Fox.com.

Scientists say that they have formulated a way to help people in stressful and demanding work environments track their brainwaves and brain usage — an electronic tattoo device, or “e-tattoo,” on the person’s face.

In a study posted in the science journal Device, the team of researchers wrote that they found e-tattoos to be a more cost-effective and simpler way to track one’s mental workload.

Dr. Nanshu Lu, the senior author of the research from the University of Texas at Austin, wrote that mental workload is a critical factor in human-in-the-loop systems, directly influencing cognitive performance and decision-making.

Lu told Fox News Digital in an email that this device was motivated by high-demand, high-stake jobs such as pilots, air traffic controllers, doctors and emergency dispatchers. 

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Scientists say that they have formulated a way to help people track their brainwaves and brain usage. In a study posted in the journal Device, the team of researchers wrote that they found a more cost-effective and simpler way to track one’s mental workload. (Dr. Nanshu Lu)

Lu also said ER doctors and robot/drone operators can also leverage this technology for training and performance enhancements. 

One of the goals of this study was to find a way to measure cognitive fatigue in high leverage and mentally straining careers.

The e-tattoo is temporarily attached to the subject’s forehead, and is smaller than current devices in use today.

According to the study, the device works by using electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG) to measure both brain waves and eye movements.

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While most EEG and EOG machines are bulky and expensive, this e-tattoo brings a compact and cost-effective solution to that problem. (iStock)

While most EEG and EOG machines are bulky and expensive, the e-tattoo offers a compact and cost-effective solution.

Lu wrote that in this study, “we propose a wireless forehead EEG and EOG sensor designed to be as thin and conformable to the skin as a temporary tattoo sticker, which is referred to as a forehead e-tattoo.”

Lu also added that “human mental workload is a crucial factor in the fields of human-machine interaction and ergonomics due to its direct impact on human cognitive performance.“

The way the study was conducted was with six participants being shown a screen on which 20 letters flashed up, one at a time, at various locations. 

The team found that as the tasks became harder, the different types of brainwaves detected showed shifts in activity that corresponded to a higher mental workload response. (iStock)

Participants were asked to click a mouse if either the letter itself, or its location, matched one shown a given number of letters.

Each participant carried out the task multiple times, corresponding to four levels of difficulty.

The team found that as the tasks became harder, the different types of brainwaves detected showed shifts in activity that corresponded to a higher mental workload response.

The device consists of a battery pack and reusable chips with a disposable sensor.

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Lu said that the device is currently a lab prototype.

“Before it can be ready for commercialization, it will need more development, such as real-time, on-tattoo mental workload decoding and validation on more people and in more realistic environments,” she said. “The prototype currently costs $200.”

Nick Butler is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Do you have any tips? Reach out to Nick.Butler@Fox.com.

Scientists say a species of bacteria rewrites the history of when an infectious and potentially deadly disease first arrived in the Americas. And it was long before the arrival of European explorers.

Researchers from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, with help from a U.S. university, recently announced in a news release that a second species of bacteria is also responsible for the disease known as leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, in the Americas. 

In years past, many believed that the bacterium known as Mycobacterium leprae caused leprosy and that it was only spread in America by early European explorers and settlers.

However, the revelation of a second bacterium puts that theory of blaming the settlers on its head, as an existing strain was already on the continents calling the New World home.

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The Institut Pasteur in Paris announced that they have found a second species of bacteria responsible for the disease in the Americas. (Netflix/Paramount)

The bacterium Mycobacterium lepromatosis existed and infected humans for 1,000 years prior to Europeans arriving, researchers say.

Dr. Maria Lopopolo, the first author of the study and researcher at the Laboratory of Microbial Paleogenomics at the Institut Pasteur, said it changes everything about leprosy in the Americas.

“This discovery transforms our understanding of the history of leprosy in America. It shows that a form of the disease was already endemic among Indigenous populations well before the Europeans arrived,” she said in the release.

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Scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, alongside the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Colorado, conducted the study. (iStock)

The study — led by scientists from the Laboratory of Microbial Paleogenomics at the Institut Pasteur, alongside the French National Center for Scientific Research, and the University of Colorado in the U.S. — began after Mycobacterium lepromatosis was found in a Mexican patient in 2008, and red squirrels in the British Isles in 2016.

Using advanced genetic techniques to reconstruct the genomes of Mycobacterium lepromatosis from ancient individuals from Argentina and Canada, scientists found that the two strains from the different regions were genetically close in the Mycobacterium genome family tree, meaning that the bacteria spread rapidly throughout the continent.

The release stated that the results confirmed that Mycobacterium lepromatosis had already spread throughout North and South America.

The researchers were able to study over 800 different DNA samples from ancient human remains and recent medical cases showing signs of leprosy. (iStock)

Researchers worked in collaboration with indigenous communities, various international institutions and archaeologists, according to the release, and were able to study over 800 DNA samples from ancient human remains and recent medical cases showing signs of leprosy.

Nicolás Rascovan, the lead author of the study at the Institut Pasteur, said that the research proves that human history can be changed.

“We are just beginning to uncover the diversity and global movements of this recently identified pathogen,” he said. “This study allows us to hypothesize that there might be unknown animal reservoirs.”

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says leprosy can affect the nerves, skin and eyes of patients, and is treated with antibiotics. Up to 225 people in the U.S., and 250,000 around the world, contract Hansen’s disease, according to the CDC.

Nick Butler is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Do you have any tips? Reach out to Nick.Butler@Fox.com.