Ever since the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2, scientists have been scrambling to identify the species of origin to understand how the new coronavirus first leapt from its animal hosts to humans, causing the current pandemic infecting more than a million people worldwide.
Scientists have been looking for an intermediate animal host between bats, which are known to harbor many coronaviruses, and the first introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into humans.
Many animals, beginning with snakes and most recently, pangolins, have all been put forth as the likely intermediate, but the viruses isolated from them are too divergent from SARS-CoV-2, suggesting a common ancestor too far back in time—-living in the 1960s.
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