Forget Mammoths: These Researchers are Exploring Bringing Back the Extinct Christmas Island Rat
Published:09 Mar.2022 Source:Cell Press
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but in a paper published March 9 in the journal Current Biology, a team of paleogeneticists turn their attention to Rattus macleari and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.
De-extinction work is defined by what is unknown. When sequencing the genome of an extinct species, scientists face the challenge of working with degraded DNA, which doesn't yield all the genetic information required to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct animal. With the Christmas Island rat, which is believed to have gone extinct because of diseases brought over on European ships, evolutionary geneticist Tom Gilbert (@Evohologen) at University of Copenhagen and his colleagues lucked out.