About 750 thylacine specimens are held in museums, and most are pelts or bones with little viable DNA. In 2008, Pask’s team was the first to take genetic material from an extinct species and make it function inside a living one, inserting thylacine DNA involved in bone and cartilage development into mouse embryos.Īt that time, the DNA sequences they had were highly degraded, making sequencing an entire genome almost impossible. “If two animals adapt to look almost identical, do you see that also reflected in their genome – can you actually find parts of their DNA that evolve to look very similar?” he says. Since scientists already have robust genomes for dogs and related species, sequencing the extinct animal’s genome would help them look for convergent similarities in their genes, helping them understand evolution at a molecular level. “The thylacine and the dog is the closest example of convergent evolution that we’ve ever seen measured between any two species,” says lead author Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne. These two groups of animals last shared a common ancestor 160 million years ago, and yet they independently led very similar lifestyles in different parts of the world. Researchers wanted a better look at thylacine genes to help them understand why the predatory marsupials evolved to look and act so much like wolves. (Learn more about de-extinction in National Geographic magazine.) The species was declared extinct in 1982. The last known thylacine died in Hobart Zoo in 1936, but the species may have persisted in the wild into at least the 1940s. It became extinct on the mainland 3,000 years ago but survived on the southern island of Tasmania until human hunters, supposedly trying to protect their livestock, drove it to extinction in the early 20th century. The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was a wolf-size carnivorous marsupial once common across Australia. Watch researchers working to bring back animals like the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth discuss the implications of their work. Once only an idea in science fiction, de-extinction is poised to become reality.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |