This sort of thing makes you wonder about how valuable protecting biodiversity is - how easily one of the hundreds of thousands of species being wiped out could be critical in allowing us to find out some key potential understanding of how DNA can work, which otherwise it could take us centuries to uncover without a natural example to start from.
Little tip from the future: engineer a mouse to express the same gene. 2 things happen, 1) the mouse doesn't get cancer and 2) be amazed at how long the mouse lives....