science · 23 January 2009 · 15 years ago
In 2009, the birth and 7-minute life of the first extinct-animal clone was described in the journal Theriogenology. A clone of the Pyranean ibex, or bucardo, was created using DNA from frozen skin samples taken in 1999 from the last individual before it died (6 Jan 2000). The mother was a closely-related subspecies of the Spanish ibex. The surrogate goat was implanted with an egg into which the bucardo's DNA had been inserted to replace the original gentic material. The research effort was the work of a team of scientists at the Center for Agro-Nutrition Research and Technology in Aragon, Spain. The team had implanted 208 embryos in different goats, of which seven became pregnant. Of those, just one resulted in a live birth, a clone that died within 7 minutes of respiratory failure due to lung defects. The bucardo thus went extinct a second time.
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