Deep in the mountains of Yunnan Province, China, in the spring of 2012, six men walked into an abandoned copper mine to clear bat guano from the walls. Bat guano is the accumulated droppings of bats, a rich, dark, crumbly material that is absolutely loaded with fungal spores. Within days, they were fighting for their lives.

They developed high fever, dry cough, profound fatigue, and severe respiratory distress. CT scans showed diffuse ground-glass opacities throughout their lungs, hazy shadows caused by alveolar damage and surfactant breakdown. Blood tests revealed elevated D-dimer, coagulopathy, thrombocytopenia, and clear evidence of widespread microvascular injury. Three of the six miners died. The survivors endured months of debilitating illness that looked like a bizarre hybrid of severe pneumonia and systemic metabolic collapse.

Scientists later traced the source to horseshoe bats roosting in that very cave. In 2013, a team led by Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology returned to the mine and collected samples. The researchers made multiple trips back to the same cave between 2012 and 2015, gathering hundreds of samples from the bats and the environment.

Among those samples was a previously unknown sequence they named RaTG13.

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