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| To Clone or Not To Clone... |
| Is it really possible to clone an extinct animal like in the movie "Jurassic Park"? The picture on the right shows one of the six preserved Thyalcine pups in the world. It is preserved in alcohol which is fortunet as that preserves its DNA. Recently a man named Professor Michael Archer brought up the idea to clone the Thylacine back to life. Six tazzy pups from around the world were preserved sometime in the late 1800s. Obviously Acher thinks if it can be done to Dolly the sheep it can be done to an extinct species. This can not so easily be accomplished. Science today is not so advanced as to go around cloning animals. But by trying we learn more. To clone this animal one would need DNA strands taken from it. The problem with the alcohol is while it preserved our pups very well it dried out their bodies in the meantime. Which means that our DNA strand is also dehydrated. So to the first thing we'd have to do is rehydrate our little Tazzy. This in itself is a difficult thing to pull off. |
| The truth is....The cloning of this animal is going to be an extremely difficult process. I don't want to sound like I don't ever want this to happen. I'd love for this animal to live again and in my lifetime. I'm only 14 so this might happen. In the meantime besides the problem of cloning the tiger if we DID pull it off then we'd come across the problem of a surrogant mother. A recent test mixing the genes of a camal and a guanaco made some people think. After mixing these two species genes we artificially inseminated the female guanaco. After several repeated failures a calf was born. Curiously enough some gene inside the guanaco suppressed the camal/guanaco's growth. A camal being much bigger than a guanaco that if the fetus was larger than the uterus that would've been a problem. But as soon as the calf was born over a period of weeks it soon was taller than its mother. So if this can happen then maybe we might be able to artificially inseminate a quoll or a tazmanian devil with the Thylacine clone. Pouch size would become an issue later but that can be taken care of with an artificial pouch. |
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| Perhaps this could be a future surrogant mother for the Thylacine.... |
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