Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction

zerobeat writes "Scientists from Melbourne, Australia have managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone from the now extinct Tasmanian Tiger. The gene was expressed in a mouse embryo so the full reincarnation of a full Tassie Tiger is a long way off. You can listen to an MP3 of ABC Australia's Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists. This is the first time DNA from an extinct species has been made to live again in a live animal."

Brings to mind Jurassic Park

[CRCulver (715279)]

In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park [amazon.com] , the dinosaur DNA extracted from the stomachs of mosquitos trapped in amber is incomplete as well, but by combining it with the DNA of modern reptiles, a decent simalcrum of a dinosaur could be had. Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?

Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park

[dreamchaser (49529)]

Probably not, but it makes for interesting thought experiments. I would not use reptiles though. Birds are probably far closer genetically to dinosaurs than any living reptiles are today. Some might even say that dinosaurs didn't really die off; they evolved into birds and lived on in that manner.

Re:

[someone1234 (830754)]

Well, the tiger DNA is only 70 years old. The Dino DNA is 70 million years old.

Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park

[houghi (78078)]

Well, the tiger DNA is only 70 years old. The Dino DNA is 6000 years old.
There, corrected it for you. ;-)

Re:

[Reece400 (584378)]

Pfft, We all know that dinosaurs never actually existed. The bones were put there to test you....

Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?

In a word: No. Grabbing one gene from an extinct species is very different than grabbing most of the entire genome is. Plus, the Tasmanian Tiger is far more-recently-extinct than dinosaurs, so the DNA is, without a doubt, much, much newer. (DNA degrades significantly over time.)

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

It should be noted as well, that when it was apparent the Tasmanian Tiger would become extinct, they started to preserve the remains in alcohol rather than formaldehyde. Alcohol does not damage DNA the way formaldehyde does.

Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park

[Skippy_kangaroo (850507)]

I think you are indulging in a bit of creative reinterpretation of history:

1933 Last wild Thylacine captured
1936 Last Thylacine in captivity dies
1936 Thylacine added to list of protected wildlife
1953 DNA discovered

Given that DNA and its chemical structure was unknown in the 1930s - when it really mattered - they could not have been choosing to use alcohol because it did not degrade DNA. Interesting story but no banana.

Re:

[abhitux (1279018)]

this time the tigers would be killed by Global Warming

Re:

[wattrlz (1162603)]

In the movie they used amphibians.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

In the movie they used amphibians.

Makes you wonder why they didn't sit around going "Bud" .... "Weis"......."Er"...... doesn't it?

Re:

[pleappleappleap (1182301)]

Who says they didn't? Do you speak dinosaur?

Re:

[FesterDaFelcher (651853)]

who still writes science fiction as it was intended -- fiction based on science.

You're right, the "Manifesto of Science Fiction Writers" from the 1600's clearly stated that the intent of science fiction was to base fiction on science.

Come on. People write books. Those books must be categorized in order to sell. There's no great conspiracy trying to ruin the science fiction genre and subjugate your reading habits. Take off the tinfoil hat.

Re:

[justinlee37 (993373)]

If the fiction is not based in science, then it should be classified as fantasy, not science fiction. We don't think there's a conspiracy -- we just think people are too stupid to categorize correctly.

Eeek!

[dreamchaser (49529)]

I for one do NOT welcome our new tasmanian mouse overlords.

On a more serious note, it would be fascinating if they could bring back a few recently extinct species. DNA degrades quite a bit over time though, so any hopes of a real life 'Jurassic Park' are probably going to remain science fiction forever.

Re:Eeek!

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

our new tasmanian mouse overlords.

So, would that be the mouse that roared?

Re:Eeek!

[arivanov (12034)]

In that case why don't they bloody bring something useful like the Steller Cow. While trying to bring back the some of the native Australian species is a great achievement none of them would have the direct economic impact of having a sustainable see grazer capable of living in cold water.

A unix system!

[Lord Ender (156273)]

I know this!

Re:

[Major Blud (789630)]

Um, no. The system was actually running SGI 3D Navigator. Check out the Wikipedia entry on SGI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics [wikipedia.org]

And all will be just fine...

[tekiegreg (674773)]

until some renegade security geek disables the electric fence, and T-Rex's start eating attorneys everywhere...

oh wait...let 'em run free then

Why are we even defending large predators?

[tjstork (137384)]

I'm sure a lot of environmentalists might be appalled, but, why are we trying to bring back or defend large predator species? Tigers eat people or eat things that people could eat, and they are faster and stronger than any naked man. Same can be said for lions, cheetahs, bears, gorillas, and more. We don't need -any- of these animals to be running around in any place except for on TV. It's just too dangerous! :-)

Re:

[IndustrialComplex (975015)]

I will take your advice... and never fight any Tasmanian Tigers while naked.

Re:Why are we even defending large predators?

[ChrisMaple (607946)]

Because its time for a little bit of thinning of the heard.

Politicians, actors, newscasters and talk show hosts are the most heard. Splendid idea.

Cloned marsupia

[ruinevil (852677)]

I'm too lazy to google or read the article, but have they ever cloned a EXTANT marsupial? Marsupial have a very weird development scheme compared to placental mammals, which have been cloned successfully.

You're toying with powerful forces here

[seandiggity (992657)]

"We know what we're doing. [xkcd.org]"

Tassie Tiger = next Ubuntu?

[smooth wombat (796938)]

With all the oddball names the folks at Ubuntu use, my first thought was they had named their next release and had kept in code that was on the chopping block.

Imagine my surprise. . .

Coming to theaters....

[penguin_dance (536599)]

The Thylacine ate my baby!

Typo.....?

[IHC Navistar (967161)]

"Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists".

-Please, oh please, let that be a misspelling of the Robin Williams I know.

I want a quagga

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

When they get around to recreating recently extinct species I think a particularly good candidate is the Quagga. (And I'd love to have some breeding stock for it.)

One thing that the wikipedia article doesn't mention: Zebras are essentially a striped donkey, but they (and their hybrids) are generally vicious and impossible to break and train. The Quagga was an exception: It domesticated very nicely.

Others that would be fun to bring back:
  - Dodo.
  - Passenger Pigeon. (If only for the humor of having the eastern states paved in pigeon droppings twice a year as the sky-obscuring migration goes through.)
Both were apparently very tasty.

Re:First Save the ones on the verge of extinction

[gardyloo (512791)]

Why do you hate America?!?

Re:First Save the ones on the verge of extinction

[PeterChenoweth (603694)]

Agreed. There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

Re:

[esocid (946821)]

All biologists/geneticists don't work on one project you know. There are people out there who do that "real science for humanity." But you may want to start asking why politicians and corporations don't try to fund research that investigates those topics, and not that laughable bill that was passed in the US not long ago which basically just subsidized more corn farmers.
Not trolling here, just wish this ethanol kick would end because it isn't feasible. Just look at the numbers [umn.edu].

Now back to the topic at hand

Re:First Save the ones on the verge of extinction

[thermian (1267986)]

Reality check here, they aren't trying to create a means to save animals that go extinct. It wouldn't work anyway, because many creatures require habitat that dissapears, That being what makes them go extinct in the first place.

Few animals go extinct in a way that means they could be realistically revived. A shame, but true, so that would be a losing strategy.

Lets look at a recent example, the baiji dolphin. It is now functionally, if not totally, extinct, and a major part of the cause was the fact that their habitat is no longer what it used to be, i.e a vast, silty, *quiet* river. Now it's a vast, crowded, polluted river.
Hunting was a problem too, but wouldn't have been had not the environment changed so much (meaning if there were less humans utilizing the river). They've been hunted for thousands of years and only became endangered after the wide scale industrialization of the Yangtze River.

Same for the woolly mammoth. As interesting and challenging as the recreation of that species is (and possible too, there are still frozen mammoths being excavated with intact testicles). The big problem is that they are huge creates whose habitat is long gone. Where would they go if we made them again?

The Tasmanian Tiger is a special case, being rendered extinct fairly recently, and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact.

As for saving the animals in the first place, got a few trillion dollers to pay off the poverty line hugging people that are being paid pennies to actually go out and cut down habitats to make rich people richer? Cos I haven't.

Re:

[ignavus (213578)]

"and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact"

But we are trying to chop it down as fast as we can.

Re:First Save the ones on the verge of extinction

[element-o.p. (939033)]

Fill in the missing parts of the genome with Chiuaua DNA. I bet they'd make very popular house pets.

Oh @#$%@!!! no!

The last thing I want is a house pet that sheds a wool blanket twice a year, has tusks that are nearly equal its body length and has the disposition of a Chihuahua.

Re:

[Bobb Sledd (307434)]

Not to mention the size of that pooper-scooper you'd have to take on a walk! Whooohooooo!!!

"Hey, careful out there in the back yard... you might step in a... oh... I'm sorry. The hose is over there."

Re:

[Cajun Hell (725246)]

Might as well do some CGI of them and show movies to people.

Hey, that reminds me of a movie I saw. It was called Jurassic Park Park. In the movie, they managed to clone a computer from the early 1990s and had it render dinosaurs, and then .. well, I won't spoil it.

Re:Why?

[Jellybob (597204)]

The panda is an excellent example. They just weren't made to survive.

They need to eat constantly, because they get hardly any benefit from eating bamboo shoots, which they are unable to digest properly.

But they're too damn picky to eat anything but bamboo.

Anything that isn't willing to eat food capable of keeping it alive reliably deserves to die out, no matter how cute and cuddly it is.

Re:

[ChuckSchwab (813568)]

Anything that isn't willing to eat food capable of keeping it alive reliably deserves to die out, no matter how cute and cuddly it is.

You're ignoring the fitness value of its cuteness/cuddliness.

Why do you think we kept cats around for so long? ;-)

Re:

[garett_spencley (193892)]

"Why? Species are extinct for a reason - they did not survive. I never understood an ecological reason for preservation of a particular species with organism count in 100s (like pandas, for example). Just think what would be ecological impact of disappearance of 100 pandas..."

Because humans are arrogant and many of them believe that we are directly responsible for what happens to everything on the planet. That if an animal goes extinct we are to blame and have some moral responsibility to try to save the sp

Re:Why?

[D-Cypell (446534)]

I get as sentimental about the poor as the next guy

Oopsies! That was supposed to read as "I get as sentimental about the poor [insert favoured endangered species here] as the next guy", except I used greater than and less than symbols in the original which was obviously filtered by the slashcode. For the record, I am, *in no way*, suggesting that we hunt the poor to extinction ;o).

Re:

[demallien2 (991621)]

The justification for preserving species is not because we feel guilty, but because biodiversity has tangible benefits for us. Large species, such as the panda, are excellent indicators for the health of an entire eco-system. As others have noted, animals such as the banji or the panda, or the orangutan go instinct not because of direct human action, but because they no longer have an ecosystem in which to live. That ecosystem may have plants in it that contain the genes that produce a protein that cures

Re:Why?

[penguin_dance (536599)]

Well, it would depend on WHY the species dwindled down to ~100. Was it because of natural selection or because man hunted them down to extinction. The latter was certainly the case with the American Bison and with the ongoing of whaling. And there is a case that, in a large part, man caused the Thylacine demise.

You might be able to use distant relatives to eventually create some sort of Thylacine cross. However the Thylacine is not related to either tigers or wolves [wikipedia.org] though it went by the name Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf--it is closer in relation to the Tasmanian Devil. I can't think of why you want to rekindle another, LARGER carnivorous creature with a nasty temper.

Re:

[Xtifr (1323)]

So then if we bring them back, is that natural selection too?

Re:Why?

[SpinyNorman (33776)]

The individual species (esp. large cuddly ones like Pandas) may be the poster children of species preservation, but really it's more a matter of habitat preservation and ecosystem preservation in general rather than whether any one given species makes a difference. Would it really matter if the Bamboo forests in Japan all disappeared and the Pandas with them? ... maybe not in terms of Pandas and Bamboo, but who knows what the knock-on or unexpected effects of losing that would be, or of losing a large percentage of the amazonian jungle, etc. Do we care if global temperatures rise by a few degrees due to deforestatation or greenhouse gases? Maybe not on the level of temperatures, but what if that caused global fish stocks to crash, or fresh water supplies to disappear?

As far as the "poster children", I think there is still good reason to preserve them for their own sake. See how interested people are now in the Tasmanian Tiger which isn't even that different looking to other extant species... Don't you think it'd be a shame if the next generation of children grow up in a world where large species like Pandas, Rhinos, Elephants, Gorillas etc only exist as stuffed specimens in museums? In fact I'm sure we've already all but irrecoverably ensured the demise of that particular group. We're essentially at the stage where the Tasmanian Tiger was only known from a few examples in zoos and rumored sightings in the wild, until eventually all the zoo specimens had died too.

We're currently in the middle of what is probably the largest and quickest de-speciation "extinction event" the planet has ever known - something that makes the Permian extinction look like a non-event. From the timescale perspective of millions (or tens/hundreds of millions) of years this will only be an intersting point way back in history that our descendents (if our genetic lineagee survives that long) may ponder about, but on the human timescale of our own lifetime, and that of our children and grandchildren, it sure seems a shame to be taking such a giant shit in our own back yard.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

You did. Didn't you notice the datestamp on this post? The year is 2035, and we're all working very hard on squashing the Unix epoch time bug.

Don't believe the Wiki!

[Lucid_Loki (1250576)]

Only nuts say they've seen one. I think last reported 'sighting' was c. 1970s. Various expeditions have turned up nothing.

Southwest Tasmania though is home to one of the largest protected wilderness sites on Earth and it's possible that a small population has survived. Highly doubtful though.

If we brought some back there would theoretically be an ecosystem for them. However that ecosystem has evolved 80 years without them. Reintroduction could be very harmful.

A nice oddity in a large zoo enclosure

Re:

[icegreentea (974342)]

Because they've been looking for the Tassie for the last 70 years. That hasn't quite panned out. Think about it. This isn't the entirety of the world's biological research focused at one thing. It's a bunch of scientists with some backing who are doing it. And it might have incredible payoffs (better ways to extract old/degraded DNA, figure out how to clone marsupials, blah blah). To do a search would require hundreds, if not thousands of workers, combing through the entire island on foot from end to end, l

Re:

[unfunk (804468)]

Well, here's the thing. When white people settled in Tasmania, they actively hunted the Tasmanian Tiger (more accurately known as the Thylacine) to extinction because it was believed that it was responsible for killing sheep and other livestock.
The Thylacine's habitat is still largely intact, and there have been numerous "sightings" of them over the years, but no hard evidence. It is possible that a small colony of Thylacines have survived, given the elusive nature of the creature in the first place, but i

Re:

[rantingkitten (938138)]

This isn't some species from the ancient past that went extinct through the normal course of things. This is an animal that was doing just fine until humans showed up and hunted them into near-extinction over a period of about a thousand years.

By the 30s there weren't many left, and only in Tasmania, and we finished them off by placing bounties on them to keep them from attacking sheep. Not to mention the ever-growing destruction of habitat by our farming efforts, competition with the dogs we brought with