Friday, November 30, 2018

Scientists are now trying to clone the 40,000-year-old baby horse found frozen in Siberia

BGR.com - Full Article

Mike Wehner @MikeWehner
September 6th, 2018

It was just a couple of weeks ago that the discovery of a frozen baby horse began to spread. The animal, which is thought to be as old as 40,000 years, was found frozen in Siberia, and the well-preserved remains offered researchers a glimpse at a species of wild horse that has long been extinct.

Now, with such a pristine specimen in their possession, scientists are attempting to sample the horse’s cells for material they can use to clone it. Yes, they are actually attempting to bring an extinct species back from the death… or are they?

The Siberian Times reports that the researchers are hard at work hunting for cells that would facilitate the cloning process. The team, made up of scientists from Russia and South Korea, plan to harvest an egg from a modern horse in order to artificially manufacture a cloned embryo of the ancient foal. That embryo would then be placed in a surrogate mother who would carry it to term and, if all goes well, give birth to a creature that hasn’t set foot on this planet in thousands of years.

The team seems remarkably confident that they’ll be able to pull off this remarkable series of accomplishments. They even go so far as to suggest that this is really just a stepping stone to an even more monumental achievement: cloning a woolly mammoth...

Read more here:
https://bgr.com/2018/09/06/ancient-horse-clone-south-korea-woo-suk/

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