Scientists took a sample of Kuporovic’s cells in 1980 and froze them. Kuporovic wasn’t a purebred Przewalski’s horse-he was descended from a hybrid line of horses that were only part Przewalski’s-but he had ancestry from 2 of just 12 Przewalski’s horses that were saved from extinction in the early 1900s, and he had more genetic variation than any of his living relatives. Kurt is a clone of a horse named Kuporovic who was born in 1975 in the UK. Kurt the Przewalski’s horse was made using this technique, too, except there’s a twist: the cells used to make him had to be defrosted after 40 years of cryopreservation (aka, being frozen) at San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo (which, by the way, merits further mention on its own: it’s the biggest and most diverse collection of its kind in the world, with over 10,000 living samples representing almost 1,000 species). The resulting embryo is implanted into a surrogate, and the surrogate gives birth to a clone of the animal that donated the nucleus. Their heads resemble those of ponies or mules in that they’re bigger in proportion to the rest of the body.ĭolly the sheep was cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technique where scientists take the nucleus out of a healthy, unfertilized egg and replace it with the nucleus from a somatic cell (any cell other than a reproductive cell) from the animal being cloned. They’re shorter and stockier and have round protruding bellies, as well as thick, spiky-looking manes. Przewalski’s horses look a bit different than what you probably picture when you think of a horse. In Mongolian folk tales Przewalski’s horses were seen as the “riding mounts of the gods,” and Mongolians thus call the horses “takhi,” meaning spirit or holy. There hasn’t been one seen in the wild since 1969 in the second half of the 20 th century the species’ population declined because of human and livestock taking over the land they inhabited and extra-harsh winters. But he’s not just any horse he’s a Przewalski’s horse, an endangered species of wild horse that comes from central Asia (primarily Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and western China). Kurt the horse was born in Texas this past August. This summer another animal was added to the list, except the methodology scientists used to clone it was a little different-and a pretty wild example of the wonders science can accomplish these days. There’s even a company that clones elite horses (along with dogs and cats). Two macaque monkeys were cloned in China in 2018. There’s the lab in South Korea that clones dogs for a hefty price tag (around $100k). Since then, she hasn’t had many competitors for the title of “world’s most famous cloned animal.” Other animals have been cloned, but just haven’t made as many waves in the news.

When Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, she instantly achieved worldwide fame for being the first-ever animal to be cloned from an adult cell.

Baby horae