http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/
On this day in 1996 the first mammal to be successfully cloned using genetic material from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was born.
And now, the news:
BURNED WHALE IN GULF
Ottowa black cougar (Via Chad Arment)
Prehistoric rock engravings were primitive cinema ...
Female Baboons Find a Secret to Longevity: Close G...
Farm's cows increase milk with Shakespeare
Local Couple Spots Cougar In Lake Elmo (Via D R Sh...
'Horse Boy' reappears on Google Street View in Abe...
Egyptian farmer calls two-headed calf 'a miracle'
The real zoo escapees that mimic the cartoon chara...
Dog defies nature to adopt kitten
Dolphin 'superpod' seen by wildlife spotters off S...
Barracuda Jumps In Boat, Bites Girl
Hunt for the huge black dogs haunting UK's country...
Pet rooster falls foul of legal system in Michigan...
ND golf course brings in weed-eating goats
Flight delayed by falling maggots
“Enough is enough! I have had it with these mellonfarming maggots on this mellonfarming plane!”
(edited for language version)
Showing posts with label cloning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloning. Show all posts
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Sunday, February 15, 2009
GUEST BLOGGER HEATHER MIKHAIL: Überoxen
Heather is our new rep for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and was introduced to the folks of the bloggo brigade by Corinna last week. Here is her first outing as guest blogger...
It seems like not a month goes by without the media reporting that some extinct animal, maybe, could be, cloned at some point in the near future. Generally these stories are just fluff, but very few people know about the attempts in the 1920s and 30s to bring back the Aurochs*, a prehistoric Ox that most domestic cattle are derived from. This being the period between the wars the motivation was not so much conservation, but driven by a desire for something pure and strong, a kind of livestock equivalent of the Eugenics movement which was highly influential at the time, not only in Germany, but also the rest of Europe and America.
The man in charge of this experiment was Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo from 1932 to 1945. His memoirs 'Animals my Adventure' are an interesting read, in them he recounts his trips to Africa to collect animals, his attitudes to the Africans would make a modern reader uncomfortable, as he had none of the skill of Gerald Durrell in portraying natives as just as human as 'the rest of us'. His coverage of the war era and his involvement with the Nazi
party are not really touched upon, but he does give us a vivid account of the Zoo suffering from an Allied air raid.
Heck's main interest, as a Zoologist was the Aurochs, he decided that by breeding together varieties of domestic cattle that had characteristics of this ancient beast he could recreate it. This project was begun in the 1920s, and carried on into the 30s with the approval of Hitler and Goering, who hoped that he would be able to create an Aryan theme park in eastern Prussia, where Germans could go and experience the life of the Aryans.
Ron Jonson goes into detail on this in his radio programme 'The Quest for the Aryan Cow' which has interviews with Heck's grand-daughter and includes a visit to the park in Munich where the descendants of Heck's cattle live on a island.
Despite their fearsome reputation and the awe in which they were held back in the 1930s, Jon Ronson is not that impressed by them. After all they are really just domestic cattle that are a facsimile for Aurochsen and not the genuine article. Maybe one day we will be able to clone one, but DNA extracting technology would have to be far better than today as the last aurochs died nearly four hundred years ago.
Were we to clone a thylacine or an Aurochs, we would just be recreating the genetic bottleneck that in part led to their extinction and we must think very carefully about how we go about cloning such things should it ever become scientifically viable.
*Pendantic Linguist’s Note. As Aurochs is derived from the German I have used the more germanic plural Aurochsen which aligns it with the English words Ox and Oxen.
Jon Ronson and the Quest for the Aryan Cow
Animals; My Adventure- Lutz Heck
More information on the effects of Nazism at the Zoo, during and after the Nazi Era
The man in charge of this experiment was Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo from 1932 to 1945. His memoirs 'Animals my Adventure' are an interesting read, in them he recounts his trips to Africa to collect animals, his attitudes to the Africans would make a modern reader uncomfortable, as he had none of the skill of Gerald Durrell in portraying natives as just as human as 'the rest of us'. His coverage of the war era and his involvement with the Nazi
party are not really touched upon, but he does give us a vivid account of the Zoo suffering from an Allied air raid.Heck's main interest, as a Zoologist was the Aurochs, he decided that by breeding together varieties of domestic cattle that had characteristics of this ancient beast he could recreate it. This project was begun in the 1920s, and carried on into the 30s with the approval of Hitler and Goering, who hoped that he would be able to create an Aryan theme park in eastern Prussia, where Germans could go and experience the life of the Aryans.
Ron Jonson goes into detail on this in his radio programme 'The Quest for the Aryan Cow' which has interviews with Heck's grand-daughter and includes a visit to the park in Munich where the descendants of Heck's cattle live on a island.
Despite their fearsome reputation and the awe in which they were held back in the 1930s, Jon Ronson is not that impressed by them. After all they are really just domestic cattle that are a facsimile for Aurochsen and not the genuine article. Maybe one day we will be able to clone one, but DNA extracting technology would have to be far better than today as the last aurochs died nearly four hundred years ago.
Were we to clone a thylacine or an Aurochs, we would just be recreating the genetic bottleneck that in part led to their extinction and we must think very carefully about how we go about cloning such things should it ever become scientifically viable.
*Pendantic Linguist’s Note. As Aurochs is derived from the German I have used the more germanic plural Aurochsen which aligns it with the English words Ox and Oxen.
Jon Ronson and the Quest for the Aryan Cow
Animals; My Adventure- Lutz Heck
More information on the effects of Nazism at the Zoo, during and after the Nazi Era
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