Researchers are analysing the DNA of horse hair found inside the walls of 170-year-old convict buildings at Tasmania's Port Arthur historic site.
The hair, which was used in plaster during the construction of the buildings in the 19th century, will undergo testing to find out more about the lineage of the horses and how they were used by early colonists.
William Taylor from Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History is working with the University of Queensland to identify and analyse horse remains from colonial Australia.
He said the strands of hair he found in the attics of the old houses at Port Arthur were surprisingly still intact.
"In some cases, it's big clumps of hair coming out of this plaster, and there are all kinds of different colours," he said.
"We'll screen it to see what the level of preservation of DNA, and if it's good, then the next step will be to sequence the DNA in that specimen.
"Once we have a partial DNA sequence we then have the ability to ask questions of that sequence about the traits of that animal."
Dr Taylor said a single sample of hair or bone could reveal a lot of information.
"Even if it's poorly preserved DNA, some of our modern DNA methods can often tell us, was this horse, a mule or a donkey? Was it a male or a female horse?" he said.
"If it's well preserved we can often get things like the coat colour of the horse and its relationship to different ancestral populations.
"We might also be able to learn something about the animal's diet."
'Possum' shot in horse reduction campaign
Sylvana Szydzik, an archaeologist at Port Arthur, said nine horses were recorded as living on the Tasman Peninsula in 1841.
"These would've been riding horses for high-level officers, but also for the clergymen based in Port Arthur," she said.
"We have some correspondence from 1874, which is about reducing the number of horses present at Port Arthur, and it lists their names.
"So we have Punch, Captain, Farmer, Nobby, and also Possum, whose fate was actually quite sad as he was shot in the end."
Ms Szydzik said she was hopeful the project would help them understand more about the horse's sex and lineage.
"A lot of what we do have hasn't been subject to proper analysis as yet," she said.
"We can now start to get an ID on the fragmented pieces that you can't tell from looking at it what it might be."
