Extinct animal brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue

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Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning
An extinct animal has been brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue.

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The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain.

Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects.

But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.

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Type: Discussion • Score: 21 • Views: 5,756 • Replies: 37

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Exciting!

1 Reply

Can we skip the dinosaur cloning? I think there was a movie about that and if I recall correctly it didn't turn out so well.

2 Replies

@squinney,

I'm still not clear on the gentics, here. there was no egg-sperm mix, which is what a clone is, I suppose. They implant a goat cell with the ibex dna - doesn't the resulting animal have some of the goat dna in its cells?

1 Reply

just the cute cuddly little ones.

1 Reply

@littlek,

I think they enucleate the egg, and put the ibex material in, then implant the egg into a goat.

The consistency of the lung problems is interesting...wonder if they are narrowing down what causes that?

It's not like it's an implanting in different species thing....it happens, I am gathering, when the ovum is implanted into the same species.

2 Replies

@dlowan,

breathless in anticipation

clone me now

1 Reply

@solipsister,

solipsister wrote:

breathless in anticipation

clone me now

Why? Are you extinct?

0 Replies

Japan Inc. is working on the mammoth problem.

1 Reply

Great! When the country is knee-deep in flesh-eating devil thylacines, don't come running to me!*

*you might trip over one of them

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

Quote:

the mammoth problem

I hope they can come up with a final solution to the mammoth problem

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I could go for a mammoth burger . . . however, one pound of ground round, slightly cooked so as to produce a rare burger, on a specially baked, huge bun, would suit me. You don't need to clone nothin' . . .

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http://www.classroomhelp.com/lessons/Presidents/presimages/Regan.jpg

http://thebruceblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/sarah_palin.jpg

the number one reason to end cloning research, the 2012 republican nomination

0 Replies

@Mr Stillwater,

You get the New Yorker, don't you?

I loved that article.

(Interesting news! I agree with squinney about the dinos tho...)

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@Robert Gentel,

It's a start.

Of course, if you clone only one, it's just going to become extinct again (when it dies of old age) unless you clone a breeding population (and give it an environment to live in).

Ultimately cloning extinct species will be only an entertaining trick unless whole populations can be restarted. And whole populations can only be maintained by a natural environment that matches their needs (the loss if which is exactly why they went extinct in the first place).

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You know, Roswell, that brings up another issue. That is to ask why an extinction were necessarily evil. Certainly, if it could be shown beyond a doubt that one or more species were extinguished because their environment had become poisonous to them, and no other species could fill that ecological niche and survive, it might be worth taking note of. But the simple fact of the extinction of a species, in any other circumstance, is not evidence that anything has gone wrong.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

I think they enucleate the egg, and put the ibex material in, then implant the egg into a goat.

That's right. They take a fertilized goat egg, remove its nucleus, and replace it with a nucleus from an adult ibex cell. That way, the ibex genome provides all the DNA encoding the building instructions for the body.

Minor disclaimer: The ibex thus cloned would have goat mitochondria, because mitochondria keep their DNA outside the nucleus, and multiply independently from the rest of the body.

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@Robert Gentel,

Hi

I saw some programme on Discovery the other day, where some guys tried reverting the DNA structure of a hen to its paleo days to produce a vertibrae tail and teeth, and they actually succeeded.

They named it the cloned Archaeopteryx....

It was quite interesting!

1 Reply

@MontereyJack,

MontereyJack wrote:

just the cute cuddly little ones.

http://www.boolsite.net/images/previews/Cinema/_prev/Gremlins-Gizmo.jpg

0 Replies

@vinsan,

vinsan wrote:

I saw some programme on Discovery the other day, where some guys tried reverting the DNA structure of a hen to its paleo days to produce a vertibrae tail and teeth, and they actually succeeded.

Are you sure about that? I don't remember hearing that such an animal had been produced.

I remember hearing that they "thought" it could be produced, but not that it had been.

1 Reply

Extinct animal brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue

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