South Korean and Russian scientists are set to clone extinct Ice Age cave lion cubs found in near-perfect condition in the Sakha Republic in Russia on August last year.
The head of the mammoth fauna studies department at the Yakutian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Albert Protopopov, said that the found lion cubs were “complete with all their body parts – fur, ears, soft tissue and even whiskers”.
The Russian-South Korean project called, Joint Foundation of Molecular Paleontology at North East Russia University, are eager to extract the right DNA from the remains of the found prehistoric animals.
According to Dr. Protopopov, the cubs were just a week or two old and are believed to just have perished due for hidden in a cave by their mother lion in order for them to be protected against hungry lions.
According to The Sun, one of the found cubs will be used in cloning while the other one will be placed in a museum.
South Korean scientist and cloning expert, Hwang Woo-suk, who’s currently pioneered a research work regarding the cloning of the extinct wooly mammoth, also went to the Yakutian Academy of Sciences to obtain some samples from one of the cave lion cubs for a chance of cloning it.
But, Hwang is having a problem with the extraction of the samples he’ll be needing. He and the Siberian and Korean scientists are arguing over the size of the sample.
“You have to understand, the lion cub is very small, so it was not possible to take as much as we would like. In addition, the material is highly degraded, it is partially mummified, but the part that was in the ice, preserved very well. We managed to take some samples of skin along with the muscle tissue, and we hope that we will find what we want in these samples.” Dr Protopopov said as quoted by the Siberian Times.
We just hope the research would be started ad finished as soon as possible.
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