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Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction
zerobeat writes "Scientists from Melbourne, Australia have managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone from the now extinct Tasmanian Tiger. The gene was expressed in a mouse embryo so the full reincarnation of a full Tassie Tiger is a long way off. You can listen to an MP3 of ABC Australia's Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists. This is the first time DNA from an extinct species has been made to live again in a live animal."
In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park , the dinosaur DNA extracted from the stomachs of mosquitos trapped in amber is incomplete as well, but by combining it with the DNA of modern reptiles, a decent simalcrum of a dinosaur could be had. Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?
I for one do NOT welcome our new tasmanian mouse overlords.
On a more serious note, it would be fascinating if they could bring back a few recently extinct species. DNA degrades quite a bit over time though, so any hopes of a real life 'Jurassic Park' are probably going to remain science fiction forever.
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Hmm Good but instead of bringing dead animals to life if only they concentrate on saving the nearly extinct animals that would be real science for humanity..also there are plenty of issues to look at like alternate fuels and global warming
until some renegade security geek disables the electric fence, and T-Rex's start eating attorneys everywhere...
oh wait...let 'em run free then
...in bed
I'm sure a lot of environmentalists might be appalled, but, why are we trying to bring back or defend large predator species? Tigers eat people or eat things that people could eat, and they are faster and stronger than any naked man. Same can be said for lions, cheetahs, bears, gorillas, and more. We don't need -any- of these animals to be running around in any place except for on TV. It's just too dangerous! :-)
This is my sig.
The panda is an excellent example. They just weren't made to survive.
They need to eat constantly, because they get hardly any benefit from eating bamboo shoots, which they are unable to digest properly.
But they're too damn picky to eat anything but bamboo.
Anything that isn't willing to eat food capable of keeping it alive reliably deserves to die out, no matter how cute and cuddly it is.
You did. Didn't you notice the datestamp on this post? The year is 2035, and we're all working very hard on squashing the Unix epoch time bug.
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I'm too lazy to google or read the article, but have they ever cloned a EXTANT marsupial? Marsupial have a very weird development scheme compared to placental mammals, which have been cloned successfully.
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Why do you think we kept cats around for so long?
With all the oddball names the folks at Ubuntu use, my first thought was they had named their next release and had kept in code that was on the chopping block.
Imagine my surprise. . .
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The Thylacine ate my baby!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
"Why? Species are extinct for a reason - they did not survive. I never understood an ecological reason for preservation of a particular species with organism count in 100s (like pandas, for example). Just think what would be ecological impact of disappearance of 100 pandas..."
Because humans are arrogant and many of them believe that we are directly responsible for what happens to everything on the planet. That if an animal goes extinct we are to blame and have some moral responsibility to try to save the species.
Although in some cases it's true. Such as over fishing of whales and Marlin. I'm not so sure that I would agree with indirect causation, however. Such as over hunting of a food source of another species. Food sources can be cut off due to a number of natural causes and if a species is unable to adapt and find new food that's it's problem. I'm sure many lengthy debates can be had on these issues and they all vary from situation to situation.
I'm glad they're trying to bring back the 'Tassie'; it went extinct because of excessive hunting by humans. I believe that it's our responsibility to bring something back if we kill it off due to negligence. We had no hand in killing the dinosaurs however, so that's a different story. But we should try to right our wrongs in nature.
"Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists".
-Please, oh please, let that be a misspelling of the Robin Williams I know.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Not to mention that their repution for being extremely difficult to mate is second only to.... ...you all know where I headed here right? ;o)
on the basis of available research, I should imagine a couple of fair-haired celebrities are more likely to make a reappearance long before the Tasmanian Tiger does. After all it worked for Ripley... eventually.
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So heres the thing. If the animal is extinct it was most likely due to the fact that we destroyed its habitat. So what is the point of bringing back an animal that we will only be able to put in zoos? Shame there is no gene to bring back habitats.
Well, it would depend on WHY the species dwindled down to ~100. Was it because of natural selection or because man hunted them down to extinction. The latter was certainly the case with the American Bison and with the ongoing of whaling. And there is a case that, in a large part, man caused the Thylacine demise.
You might be able to use distant relatives to eventually create some sort of Thylacine cross. However the Thylacine is not related to either tigers or wolves though it went by the name Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf--it is closer in relation to the Tasmanian Devil. I can't think of why you want to rekindle another, LARGER carnivorous creature with a nasty temper.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Although in some cases it's true. Such as over fishing of whales and Marlin.
But if one day lions were to polish off the last of the zebra, would it be any different?
We are just the only creatures on the planet capable of feeling guilty for our evolutionary success. If the ebola virus were to gain some ability that enabled it to infect all living humans, I very much doubt that it would leave the last 100 or so of us alive, keep us in zoos and initiate international breeding programmes.
At what point did the human race go from being a part of these natural systems to being above them? When did we start feeling guilty for the traits that have made us such a successful species?
I get as sentimental about the poor as the next guy, but it is survival of the fittest. A guy could dedicate his whole life to saving the tiger, the tiger doesn't look at him through the wire fence with gratitude, the tiger looks at him with lunch plans.
...is as irresponsible as causing living ones to go extinct, and not because of Hollywood-style disasters. We have enough problems with foreign species overwhelming the native environment. Imagine some giant squid being resurrected and proceeding to eat all the modern fish in the ocean. Or a tasmanian tiger accidentally interbreeding with a normal one and the aggressive, man-eating hybrid becoming the dominant species. Besides, who is to say that the piece of DNA integrated into a mouse is not a dangerous retrovirus.
Until we show our ability to preserve healthy ecosystems populated with naturally surviving species, we shouldn't take on any more ecological responsibility than what we are already unable to handle.
I get as sentimental about the poor as the next guy
;o).
Oopsies! That was supposed to read as "I get as sentimental about the poor [insert favoured endangered species here] as the next guy", except I used greater than and less than symbols in the original which was obviously filtered by the slashcode. For the record, I am, *in no way*, suggesting that we hunt the poor to extinction
The entry on Wikipedia says that sightings, while rare, are still being reported. Would it not require INFINITELY less resources to simply go catch one and get genes from it???
I'm perplexed as to why this got the green light. Can anyone clue me in?
Michael Crichton is the only author (that I'm aware of) who still writes science fiction as it was intended -- fiction based on science. He puts a lot of research into the science he uses in his books. So yes, while he does use some unrealistic things for the sake of the story (the point after all is to entertain, not be a textbook), I'd be willing to bet that what he used in Jurassic Park is at least theoretically possible.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
The justification for preserving species is not because we feel guilty, but because biodiversity has tangible benefits for us. Large species, such as the panda, are excellent indicators for the health of an entire eco-system. As others have noted, animals such as the banji or the panda, or the orangutan go instinct not because of direct human action, but because they no longer have an ecosystem in which to live. That ecosystem may have plants in it that contain the genes that produce a protein that cures MS, or protects rice from a mutated fungus, etc.
It's not guilt, but self-interest that is the main justification for current conservation efforts.
I'd certainly like to see a live woolly mammoth walking around
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Scientists genetically engineer bad-ass mouse.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Apparently the closest relative to the Tassie is the Tasmanian Devil. They should try sticking the DNA into the Devil and see if that works out. I suppose that's not possible though, Tasmanian Devils are certainly not a standard model organism and getting the permission to use them would probably be difficult.
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But we can be treated equal.
to use a mouse embryo to clone even part of a cat gene, you insensitive clods!
Invenio via vel creo
The individual species (esp. large cuddly ones like Pandas) may be the poster children of species preservation, but really it's more a matter of habitat preservation and ecosystem preservation in general rather than whether any one given species makes a difference. Would it really matter if the Bamboo forests in Japan all disappeared and the Pandas with them? ... maybe not in terms of Pandas and Bamboo, but who knows what the knock-on or unexpected effects of losing that would be, or of losing a large percentage of the amazonian jungle, etc. Do we care if global temperatures rise by a few degrees due to deforestatation or greenhouse gases? Maybe not on the level of temperatures, but what if that caused global fish stocks to crash, or fresh water supplies to disappear?
As far as the "poster children", I think there is still good reason to preserve them for their own sake. See how interested people are now in the Tasmanian Tiger which isn't even that different looking to other extant species... Don't you think it'd be a shame if the next generation of children grow up in a world where large species like Pandas, Rhinos, Elephants, Gorillas etc only exist as stuffed specimens in museums? In fact I'm sure we've already all but irrecoverably ensured the demise of that particular group. We're essentially at the stage where the Tasmanian Tiger was only known from a few examples in zoos and rumored sightings in the wild, until eventually all the zoo specimens had died too.
We're currently in the middle of what is probably the largest and quickest de-speciation "extinction event" the planet has ever known - something that makes the Permian extinction look like a non-event. From the timescale perspective of millions (or tens/hundreds of millions) of years this will only be an intersting point way back in history that our descendents (if our genetic lineagee survives that long) may ponder about, but on the human timescale of our own lifetime, and that of our children and grandchildren, it sure seems a shame to be taking such a giant shit in our own back yard.
Kinda reminds me of referring to the Internet backbone as "pipes."
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The short answer to your question is yes. It wouldn't even have to be multiple sources because any biological tissue is made up of uncountable numbers of cells, each with their own copy of the genome. So really if you extract DNA from a big enough sample and can sequence enough small enough pieces of DNA, the problem becomes simple a computational one of lining them all up into chromosomes based on overlap. With current technology we're on the edge of being able to sequence something like a Nanderthal. For dinosaurs, there might be almost no DNA left, since the fossils aren't biological tissue, so I don't know if that will ever be possible. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5802/1113
Well, that's no ordinary mouse.
Ohh.
That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
You tit! I soiled my armor I was so scared!
Look, that mouse has got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Tasmanian Tigers were marsupials. Dingos are dogs brought to the islands by seafarers withing the last 5,000 years or so. Dingos and Tassie Tigers are about as non closely related as two mammals can be.
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Dingos are not marsupials so they would match no better then any other placental mammal. All of the Thylacinidae are extinct so the closest matches would be in the order Dasyuromorphia and the family Dasyuridae (marsupial mice, quolls, and Tasmanian Devil) or the family Myrmecobiidae (the Numbat aka Banded Anteater).
china. pandas are from china.
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
bah - nitpicker! ;-)
There are more species alive now than there EVER have been EVER. Thanks to evolution the planet gets more diverse all the fucking time, humans are not in any way standing in the way of that. It wouldn't be financially viable to bring the planet's species diversity to similar levels of, say, even the late Jurassic period, let alone some kind of hypothetical diversity crisis people keep whining about.
Learn something new.
Man hunting them down to extinction is natural selection. We are not magically separate from the animal kingdom, and there is nothing particularly interesting about us that makes our actions somehow distinct from other natural processes.
Yeah, they really are the most useless of animals.
They have this lovable tendency, for instance, to get knocked up in the summer (when food is plentiful) spend their entire pregnancy starving in a cave, then come out with their newborn babe in the beginning of winter (when it's snowing) then head HIGHER into the mountains where there's less food.
They're impossible to get to breed, and even after they reproduce, the female tries to kill the male. Very few panda cubs survive to adulthood.
Finally, they eat the single most useless food in their habitat (bamboo), even though they are carnivorous and they cannot digest cellulose.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
True, but we have the ability to pretty much obiterate every species on the planet, except maybe cockroaches. We have (or should have) more resposibility. Animals hunt for food and survival. Many times in the past we hunted merely for trophys or in the case of the bison, to force the native americans to move to reservations or starve.
To ignore our responsiblity in this would be our folly and cause our eventual demise.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Don't expected to get modded up for such a vague reference. Even though the movie was quite popular, few people ever really watched it that far. Unfortunately, I actually saw the ending once, and it pretty much ruined the whole thing!
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Because the cats have you under a form of mind control wherein you will obey any instruction given to you in LOLSpeak?
In that spirit, getz meh uh Samooel Ahdams!
How the hell can you say something like that? That is simply arrogant given the incredible amounts of things that we don't know about the past compared to what we know about today. In any case, estimates of the current rate of extinction pretty much states that there are less species today than there were 2000 years ago. We've knocked out key components of multiple ecosystems, and introduced the same species all over the world. Evolution is slow and gradual (generally). We are not. Pick any mega fauna in the world. We can wipe it out within 10 years. Pick all of them, we can wipe them out within a century. And there simply isn't time within a century to evolve new mega fauna. Hell, if we wanted me, we could probably reduce the entirety of North American forest to a monoplot of elm trees given a couple decades of unrestricted logging.
When they get around to recreating recently extinct species I think a particularly good candidate is the Quagga. (And I'd love to have some breeding stock for it.)
One thing that the wikipedia article doesn't mention: Zebras are essentially a striped donkey, but they (and their hybrids) are generally vicious and impossible to break and train. The Quagga was an exception: It domesticated very nicely.
Others that would be fun to bring back:
- Dodo.
- Passenger Pigeon. (If only for the humor of having the eastern states paved in pigeon droppings twice a year as the sky-obscuring migration goes through.)
Both were apparently very tasty.
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So then if we bring them back, is that natural selection too?
...please.
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hey just because your id is 50k doesn't mean you are immune from nitpickiness, especially when entirely different geographies and cultures are involved :)
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
Ignore D-Cypell. He's just another of Jonathon Swift's sock puppets.
I don't see why this is marked flaimbait. Its exactly what humanity is thinking. Its not that "Nature is overrated" its that its been rated as less important than many other things. At least the poster is honestly expressing the thought that most are acting out.
A Recent report estimates that approaching 30% of species might extinct. Let that be an exaggeration but the fact remains many environments are being destroyed. In the meantime , we all remain more interested in the horsepower of our sports car, the power of our new computer or the taste of tomorrow's exotic dinner out.
Not only that but less than a billion of us have really reached anything like our potential for destroying the environment. But a couple of billion Chinese and Indians are about to catch up. What do you think it will be like when we are 3 times as effective?
Of course I'm hoping for a technological solution, failing that I'm hoping things don't meltdown before I get old and die (I don't really want to live in a concrete bunker thanks). I don't have much faith in people to react and change in time.
cheers,
david
... that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.