Recently, San Diego Zoo partnered up with the wildlife preservation group Revive and Restore and a pet cloning company ViaGen Equine to create an exact copy of Kuporovic. The embryo was planted in a surrogate mother, a common horse.
Shawn Walker, the chief science officer at ViaGen Equine reports “This new Przewalski’s colt was born fully healthy and reproductively normal. He is head butting and kicking when his space is challenged, and he is demanding milk supply from his surrogate mother.”
This whole deal is not only good news for Przewalski’s horses, because this project demonstrates that we can keep genetic material viable for many years. Thus principles we see in action see here can potentially be applied to other endangered, even extinct species. Yes, you’ve read that right, Revive and Restore hopes to revive a wooly mammoth one day.
