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Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning
The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000, but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone."
So, this Ibex became the first species to become extinct twice?
But if they have skin samples, then they do have the mitochondrial DNA. We just don't have the ability to replace that part of the cell structure. Yet. Another problem is that the specimen is female, meaning there is no Y chromosome, so we could never create a male.
At this point we should probably be harvesting DNA from threatened species (from enough donors to form a not-completely-terrible breeding population) and storing it away somewhere.
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The first generation IS a hybrid, but then you implant that with extracted DNA, and so forth so that after several generations you get something that is pretty much equivalent to the extinct species.
How will that recover the mitochondrial DNA? What they need to do is to replace that as well, not just continue implanting the chromosomal DNA. Eventually we may learn how to do that, but we can't do it yet.
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As mentioned before, this is not an exact clone. The only thing this story proves is that they can create a hybrid animal (nothing new there) and that the researches who did this were dishonest about the product (nothing new there) and that the news media is full of a bunch of dolts with little desire or propensity for actual journalism (nothing new there either). The only thing that was created was 7 minutes of suffering.
Dinosaurs still exist. We call them "birds".
In particular, they're the decendents of the clade Maniraptora, which includes velociraptor. Many are still remarkably similar to their ancestors -- for example, compare these reconstructed skull images of oviraptors with modern birds (for example, the cassowary)
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
I think the confusion lies in the bizarre implication that we humans are somehow unnatural, as if no other species has ever hunted another to extinction.
Kid-proof tablet..
Nature will find a way, apparently, to do everything except avert the extinction in the first place...
I think that should tell us something.