Breakthrough: World's First Extinct Animal Brought Back to Life - Through Cloning |
However, a Pyrenean ibex, or mountain goat, is not exactly a Jurrasic dinosaur |
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Editors published 2/1/2009 11:30:00 AM
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Source: Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning Richard Gray and Roger Dobson , Telegraph
For the first time ever, an extinct animal has been resurrected through cloning.
A wild mountain goat, called a Pyrenean ibex, died out in the year 2000 in northern Spain. Skin samples were saved from the animal and kept frozen 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.
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.
Dr Jose Folch, from the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon, in Zaragoza, northern Spain, led the research along with colleagues from the National Research Institute of Agriculture and Food in Madrid.
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