They want to resurrect an 8,000-year-old prehistoric bison

Not content with resurrection Siberian permafrost mammothNow a group of scientists wants to bring back to life a bison, extinct more than 8,000 years ago, whose mummified remains were recently opened in Russia.

The mummified creature was discovered in the city of Haastaakh, Verkhoyansk region of Russia in the summer of 2022 and donated to the Laboratory of the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk. Preliminary investigations indicated that the bison was a juvenile of unknown sex who was between 1 and 2 years old at the time of death. Scientists do not yet know when bison lived, but similar specimens found in 2009 and 2010 date from 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, NEFU researchers write in an article. release.

During the autopsy, the researchers took samples of the bison’s fur, skin, bones, muscles, fat and horns, and completely removed the animal’s brain. The tissues are so well preserved that it is hoped they could be used to revive extinct species.

“We are working with a unique find that can be cloned in the future thanks to selected materials,” Hwang Woo Seok, a former cloning expert and NEFU contributor, said in a statement.

Anyway, Love Dalenea paleogeneticist at Stockholm University in Sweden, who was not involved in the autopsy, told Live Science he was unsure of the venture’s success.

“In my opinion, it is impossible to clone extinct animals from such tissue.. He added that while the tissues were exceptionally well preserved, the DNA inside them was probably too degraded to be cloned.

“To make cloning possible, you need to find intact chromosomes, but even in the best samples, we see that each chromosome is fragmented into millions of pieces,” Dahlen said. “In my opinion, you are more likely to flip a coin and come up heads a thousand times in a row than to find an intact chromosome in a specimen that is thousands of years old.”