The first endangered American animal has been cloned
Back to Topic
Click to Print
Useful Websites
Glossary Term Selection
Last summer a horse named Kurt was born in Texas. Kurt wasn’t just any horse—he was a clone made from DNA that had been frozen for 40 years and came from an endangered wild horse species from Central Asia.
Kurt was—and still is—pretty special. But now he’s got some competition for the ti ftle of ‘most amazing endangered animal cloned from frozen DNA.’ The new contender is a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann.
Elizabeth Ann was born in December in a conservation center in Colorado, the result of years’ worth of careful research and planning. She’s the first-ever endangered American animal to be cloned—and she may be her species’ best hope for long-term survival.
About the ferrets
Black-footed ferrets were endemic to Western US states like Wyoming and a Colorado, but started to die off in the mid-1900s when their main food source, prairie dogs, also died off due to disease and habitat loss. A small population of the ferrets was discovered in Wyoming in the 1980s, and skin biopsie...
Want to see the rest of this article?
Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?
- Useful related articles
- Video and multimedia references
- Statistical information and reference material
- Glossary of terms
- Key Facts and figures
- Related assignments
- Resource material and websites
