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Natural history museum collections harbour a record of wild species from the past centuries, providing a unique opportunity to study animals as well as their infectious agents. Thousands of great ape specimens are kept in these collections, and could become an important resource for studying the evolution of DNA viruses. Their genetic material is likely to be preserved in dry museum specimens, as reported previously for monkeypox virus genomes from historical orangutan specimens. Here, we screened 209 great ape museum specimens for 99 different DNA viruses, using hybridization capture coupled with short-read high-throughput sequencing. We determined the presence of multiple viruses within this dataset from historical specimens and obtained several near-complete viral genomes. In particular, we report high-coverage (> 18-fold) hepatitis B virus genomes from one gorilla and two chimpanzee individuals, which are phylogenetically placed within clades infecting the respective host species., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data can be reprocessed using the tools described in the Methods section, namely kraken2 for metagenomic classification, bwa for mapping to reference genomes, following the documentation in the associated repository. Custom code for processing and visualisation is available under https://github.com/admixVIE/Great-Ape-DNA-Virome ., (© 2024. The Author(s).)