A Chinese pet-cloning company has announced the birth of the world's first cloned Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), which was carried to term by an unlikely surrogate mother – a beagle.
That same year, the company also successfully cloned an endangered Przewalski's horse , and their technicians are now attempting to revive the extinct passenger pigeon using cloning technology.
If the clones can reproduce with other non-cloned individuals, this gives threatened species a fighting chance to adapt to the selection pressures that are driving them towards extinction, he added. "For mammals, it appears that two species must share a common ancestor less than 5 million years ago" for the surrogate pregnancy to be successful, Novak said. This opens up the possibility of reviving extinct species by using closely related living surrogate species, he added.However, there are also some major limitations to cloning.
Cloning also has a very low success rate compared with artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization, Novak said.