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."

Comments

No Problem...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We can just patch the damaged or missing segments with frog DNA...

Re:No Problem...

[bearflash]

And since they're all females, there's no way they can reproduce! I'm 100% certain that the Ibex will never escape this remote Costa Rican island

Not exactly.

[LWATCDR]

The mitochondrial DNA will not be from the IBX so what you have is still an hybrid.
Maybe better than nothing but not really bringing the species back.

Re:Not exactly.

[pclminion]

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.

Re:Not exactly.

[BluBrick]

I'm still waiting for them to do this with the wooly mammoth; logic dictates that if my ancestors hunted this species to extinction, they must have been REALLY tasty!

Logic dictates nothing of the sort. It could be that mammoth meat tasted terrible, but a mammoth tusk was the standard price for a blowjob.

Corrected title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pyrenean Ibex extinct... again.

A new first

[Haxzaw]

So, this Ibex became the first species to become extinct twice?

Re:A new first

[clone53421]

And the first clone to be the only one of its kind. ’Tis a grand day for clones!

Re:So when...

[JustOK]

Mammoth fail. Tusk. Tusk. Tusk.

Re:Evil clone

[ianare]

The normal method fails here, after all they're _goats_

Not necessarily

[HangingChad]

...which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.

I have a goat herd and trust me when I say there doesn't have to be any flaws in the DNA to lose a baby. I've seen them still born, born too frail to stand up and get colostrum from mom, seen them live for a couple days and then die for no apparent reason. There's a reason goats have babies two and sometimes three at a time. The loss rate can be high, even under ideal conditions. The breed difference could account for it. Maybe the original breed had a slightly longer gestation period than modern goats.

Back in the day I used to help a vet implant zebra embryos in horses. The take rate was a bit higher than that experiment, but we had more embryos to work with. 10% was a pretty good rate for implants and there's a lot of data on horses.

Re:Jurassic Park here we come!

[Rei]

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)