Australia & NZ
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Revival of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger
Extinct for 80 years. Would be cool to see it back.
THE Tasmanian tiger has been extinct for more than 80 years — but that could be about to change.
Once considered a fanciful idea, it is now plausible that we’ll see the resurrection of certain extinct species. Continual advances in science, particularly in the field of genetics, means that we are getting ever closer to bringing the iconic Australian marsupial, and others, back to life.
Andrew Pask, a biologist from the University of Melbourne, was part of a team who worked for 10 years to successfully sequence the entire genome of a Tasmanian tiger, also known as a thylacine, with the help of a four-week-old joey preserved in a different solution to other damaged specimens.
Prof Pask referred to the preserved joey as the “the Holy Grail” specimen and allowed researchers to piece together the full picture of the marsupial’s “genetic blueprint”.
The researchers completed the genome sequencing in December last year, gaining fresh insight about the animal.
“It gave us so much information about what was unique about the thylacine. We learned more about its biology, we learned about its population structure over time, we also learned more about where it sits and how it related (biologically) to other marsupials” he said.
“It was a very, very unique marsupial species. The last one of its kind.”
That uniqueness is exactly why we might want to bring it back to life — but it’s a quality that also makes the process extra difficult.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/s...b5153e2c2c07e7
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Originally Posted by arkas
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