Many important zoonotic viruses in humans such as Ebola, Zika and the HIV-precursors have emerged, and continue to do so, from Afrotropical mammals in the Congo basin. This region also holds one of the highest mammal diversities in the world, of which thousands of specimens are stored in the museum collections of RBINS, RMCA and CSB-UNIKIS. From the same region, KU Leuven stores thousands of archived pathology specimens of human origin. These are not just collections of mammal tissues and human biopsies: the genomic material of the viruses that these hosts had been carrying have been stored safely in these tissue collections as well. The main objective of the proposed project is to estimate the emergence potential of zoonotic viruses from the Afrotropics. We will do so through reconstructing virus evolutionary histories in relation to their hosts, based on virus genomic data generated from our tissue collections. We will test whether particular taxonomic or ecological groups of mammals hold a higher diversity of viruses, and/or viruses with higher cross-species emergence potential. This project connects a consortium of expert virologists, evolutionary biologists, phylogeneticists, museum curators and taxonomists. We believe that through working together, the proposed project will lead to ground-breaking new insights into the relationships between host taxonomy, host traits and the relative probabilities for different viruses to emerge in new host species – such as humans.