The mysteries of the past have always fascinated humanity. The desire to discover what life was like before generations of our ancestors were born, or before humans even existed, has driven prehistoric research. An extension of this desire is the "revival" or "restoration" of long-extinct species. Therefore, when the remains of animals that no longer exist are discovered, we are inevitably overcome with curiosity to see them alive, not to mention how much we could learn if we did. Scientists working in Siberia are attempting to do just that, attempting to clone an extinct, frozen baby horse that died 42,000 years ago.
An exceptionally well-preserved foal was discovered in August 2018 in the Batagay Crater, located in the East Siberian taiga, Russia. The crater was a real find for scientists, who discovered several frozen mammoths there after the permafrost thawed.
The Batagay Crater formed in the 1960s when thawing permafrost caused ground subsidence after Soviet troops cleared the surrounding forest in Yakutia (also known as the Sakha Republic). As more of the crater became exposed, more and more permafrost began to thaw on warm days. Since its formation, the crater has been steadily expanding.
Locals are superstitious about the crater due to its constant expansion, often calling it "the gateway to the underworld" or "the mouth of hell." It currently measures one kilometer long and 800 meters wide. The foal was found buried 30 meters underground in the crater, covered in mud. This is the first time scientists have discovered a prehistoric horse of this age in such amazingly good condition.
The male foal died approximately 42,170 years ago, when he was just 20 days old. He was a Lena horse, a close relative of the horses that currently inhabit Yakutia.
After the young horse was cleaned of dirt, scientists were able to determine its color: its mane and tail were black, and its body was reddish with a dark stripe along its spine. The carcass showed no visible damage, and even the internal organs were well preserved.
Scientists initially estimated the fossil's age at 30,000–40,000 years. However, after radiocarbon dating by South Korean Professor Hwang Woo-suk of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, Dr. Semyon Grigoriev, a leading researcher at the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, confirmed its exact age at 42,170 years.
To take one step closer to cloning mammoths, a group of scientists from Russia and South Korea collaborating in Yakutsk decided to search the foal for viable cells that could be used for cloning.
The main goal of the scientists' collaboration is to revive the woolly mammoth population for the creation of a park dedicated to the Ice Age. However, the evolutionary differences between mammoths and elephants, which are the best options for a surrogate mother, are far greater than the differences between the horse calf they discovered and modern horses. The scientists believe that if they can extract living cells from the carcass, reviving the prehistoric horse species will be easy, and the knowledge gained could aid in cloning mammoths.
The Sakha Republic already has a Pleistocene Park, a nature reserve created by Russian scientists Sergei Zimov and Nikita Zimov on the Kolyma River. The park serves as a testing ground for the hypothesis that overhunting of herbivores, rather than climate change, was the cause of the destruction of pastures at the end of the Pleistocene. Plans are underway to populate the park with mammoths after DNA is extracted from preserved carcasses, and possibly to create mammoth embryos in elephants.
Hae Hyun Kim, a lead researcher on Professor Hwang's team, will work on obtaining a primary culture using a patented technology that helps regenerate cells. She previously succeeded in extracting a living cell from a frozen dog.
Kim will collaborate with scientists from North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk and Dr. Grigoryev to extract living cells from the frozen foal's body. According to Professor Hwang, this is an extremely challenging task, as water crystallizes when tissue freezes, destroying the cells. Cell culture is the process of extracting cells from tissue and growing them under controlled conditions. A primary culture, or cell, is a cell extracted directly from its source—in this case, a foal. He also believes that the very act of extracting living cells from a foal's body is a unique achievement, as no one has succeeded in doing so before.
If scientists succeed, it would likely be the first cloned animal from prehistoric times, although several ancient, frozen organisms, such as bacteria and roundworms, have been claimed to have been recreated in recent years.
In 2000, Russell Vreeland of West Chester University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues reported that the bacterial spores they revived were trapped in saltwater that had crystallized around them nearly 250 million years ago. In March 2014, researchers from the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan revived two adult tardigrades, named SB-1 and SB-2 after "Sleeping Beauty," which had been frozen in November 1983 at -200°C (-40°F) in Antarctica.
As recently as July 2018, two of the 300 nematodes began moving and feeding after being thawed by scientists in a laboratory at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science in Moscow. One of the nematodes was found in an ancient squirrel burrow near the Kolyma River and is 32,000 years old. The other was discovered near the Alazeya River and is 41,700 years old.
[Source: TheSiberianTimes]