Clone of the endangered Przewalski's horse is born of DNA saved for 40 years
cnn.com
cnn.com
I just wanted to note how nonchalant this paragraph sounded in the context of the rest of the article. I remember the cloned sheep over a decade ago, but is animal cloning now so common a procedure that we've moved on from "Oh-em-gee, we cloned an animal!" to species bingo?
The DNA may have been perfectly preserved in lab conditions and we've got a sister species to carry the embryo so it's not comparable, but this is the first step to Jurassic park!
Slightly out in your “remember a long time ago” - Dolly was born in 1996! Pet cloning apparently started in 2004! So it’s been around long enough to somewhat mature.
Of course there's been discussions on HN about it! [1][2]
It's funny how time is perceived differently by different people!
In this case we've got both a surrogate that's "close enough" as far as we're concerned, and also extant adult members of the species that Kurt will meet (and hopefully later breed with some of them) to cover anything we have no idea a Przewalski's horse is supposed to know about and wasn't handled by domestic horse behaviour.
But a baby dinosaur has nobody to show it how to be whatever sort of dinosaur it is. We could teach it to be what we thought it was supposed to be, but we have no idea if we're right!
I think Joe Rogan talks to someone who mentions since horse clones are done by rich people and it's maturing rapidly, it stands to reason someone has cloned themselves by now, which is exciting.
There were several species of horse in the Americas until quite recently. It would be more interesting to clone some of them.
Also camels, a really big bison and bear, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolf, giant beaver, giant sloth, and glyptodont, never mind woolly mammoth and mastodon.