I’m sure many (or most) of you know about the attempts that are afoot to clone a wooly mammoth (from the frozen specimen dug up last year).
My question relates to other, even-more-recently-extinct creatures. Examples: The dodo, the passenger pigeon, the moa, the tasmanian wolf. I know that there are stuffed examples of a number of birds and mammals which have gone extinct within the past two hundred years or so.
Will it ever be possible to clone animals from genetic material which might be preserved in the fur, feathers and bits of skin of these animals, or would the DNA be hopelessly degraded? Does anyone have the skinny on this?
IIRC, efforts began a few years back to clone an extinct species of zebra from the skin of one killed in the early 20th Century. Don’t know the status of the research, but should have better luck than the mammoth, due to the much more recent exinction.
[Exploding with indignation] Tasmanian WOLF? Tasmanian Tiger, thank you. I am currently drinking my Cascade beer with a picture of one of them thyalacines on it.
Yes, they’re working on the tiger. Some apparently viable DNA has been extracted from a fetus stored in booze at one of local universities. IIRC the usual practice of storing in formaldehyde does degrade the DNA.
From what I understand, the real problem with this idea is not so much that the DNA can’t be recovered, but that it doesn’t tell the whole story. The DNA is just some data, which is inextricably linked to the reproductive environment in which it’s used.
It would be a little like someone handing you a computer database and asking you to get the application running again. But they can’t provide you with the application, or the OS that handled the files, or even the type of hardware that it ran on.
Furthermore, when you tell them you’re going to need these things, they tell you that that’s exactly why they want to get the application running again! The application is the last remaining tutorial on how to build that particular computer and write the OS.
Any current (serious) plans to do this are built around trying to tap into as similar of an environment as currently exists (wolly mammoths <==> elephants). No telling how well this will work, though.
IIRC they intend to use mammoth DNA with the DNA of a elephant and get a hybrid. They then will do it again until they’ve got a pair that can breed .
Then they will use selective breeding to weed out the elephant traits. This would take at least several generations.
Yes, exactly. How many weeks or months is the gestation period of a thylacine? How and where does the fetus attach to the mother’s uterus? What hormones flow into the fetus from the mother, and at which exact points during the gestation? All of this needs to be known before you can produce viable offspring, and you can’t learn any of it from studying the DNA itself.
If you have a surviving species similar to the one you want to resurrect, you can handwave the differences. An elephant is close enough to a mammoth, for example, that a mammoth fetus probably (hopefully) can come out of an elephant’s womb.
Someone suggested putting a thylacine fetus into a goat. I don’t understand the science behind that; surely there are other marsupials much more closely-related to the thylacine than any goat, which is a placental mammal. Wouldn’t a large kangaroo be a better choice?
This may be why they’re trying a marsupial in the first place. IIRC, marsupials don’t implant in the womb, and true gestation time (as opposed to time in pouch nursing) is negligable. I don’t know if there’s any significant hormones in the milk, but I somewhat doubt it. You could probably grow a marsupial completely in vitro, up to the point whereit would be “born” and climb up to the pouch.
The moa, assuming it was the larger species spoke- meant, is an impossible dream. There would be no way to get an egg that would be close to big enough.
Do we just want to prove we can create a flicker of life that was one gone? Do we want one adult? Do we want a whole new breeding population? All these are important considerations.
Also, there are no parents to pass on learned skills.
And another thing: forget about re-introducing these animals. Their habitat has been destroyed. Especially the passenger pigeon. And even if it weren’t, unnatural competition from introduced species would probably terminate their existance.
Once we’ve saved what we do have, we can bring back what we’ve lost.
I dunno. I imagine an ostrich egg might do, in a pinch.
Besides, you could theoretically grow a bird in vitro, couldn’t you? You certainly don’t need a “womb.” Even if a shell were necessary, why not just create an artificial eggshell? The size of the yolk and the egg white shouldnt be relevant, since those are just nutrient for the growing fetus. (Right?) You could always add more nutrient if necessary, couldn’t you?
The mammoth cloning has its problems; the DNA is somewhat dessicated, and though they intend to use an Indian elephant to carry the fetus, there is the inescapable size problem. (Wouldn’t that be like a dalmatian carrying a great dane pup?)
All I have to say is how ridiculous Jurassic Park was. Little 6’ velociraptors hatched from ostrich eggs…and monstrous 100’ brachiasaurs did as well. Hmmm…
The eggs of the giant moa were over three times larger than ostrich eggs.
As for the artificial eggshell: that would be extremely difficult. The egg, like any collection of organs, cannot be practically recreated from modern technology. Most specifically, the shell would be difficult to assimilate into a machine, as it needs to retain moisture while at the same time permitting air to go through it.
Even if you COULD use cloning to bring back an extinct species, you’d soon face another problem: Who’s going to teach the new baby animals how to behave?
Seriously! If mastodons were anything like elephants, they were highly intelligent and highly social animals. As such, they’d need adult mastodons to teach them the proper foods to eat, and the proper way to interact within the pack. We humans don’t KNOW what the proper foods for mastodons were, or how mastodon social systems worked. How could we teach them?
Don’t you see astorian?! That’s the beauty of the method Dr. Shirota and others like him describe! You could take the embryo of, say, an Asian elephant and exchange just a few of its genetic sequences with those of a woolley mammoth. The result — if it survives — would be almost completely Asian elephant; it would have just a few slight mammoth characteristics, like a coat of hair. It would behave the same way as a normal juvenile Asian elephant, and — if the mother accepts it, and I bet she will — it could learn as a normal Asian elephant would!
In re the egg size problem, couldn’t you do it in stages? That is to say, clone some bird with an egg slightly bigger than an ostrich’s, and incubate it in an ostrich egg. Then, use eggs from that creature to clone something slightly larger, and so on. Certainly, there’s still some other big problems, but I don’t see that that would be one.
Ruffian: In Jurassic Park, the book, they used artificial eggshells, custom-made to whatever size they needed. In the movie, they glossed over this by just using ostrich eggs.
None of those creatures in that book/movie/lie could survive. They are 65 million years behind in building resistance to pathogens. They would all die from disease. It is a certainty.
Moas, on the other hand, are only a couple of hunderd years behind. Most would probably make it in a controlled environment.
Absolutely wrong, Wood Thrush. You overlook the specificity of pathogens. A virus that preyed on the velociraptors, for example, would have died out with the velociraptors 65 million years ago, or evolved to prey on other species instead.
Quite the contrary to what you say, the JP beasties would seem to be unusually hardy, because there wouldn’t be any modern bugs with an evolved preference for these archaic species.
