Random question but have you heard about quaggas (or kwagga)? This is a zebra type species that went extinct, but then was resurrected jurassic park style. Except they're not rally the same and a whole new species. I read about this again and thought since you know a lot about biology you might find this interesting.
I didn't hear about this one!
I thought they were doing like they did with 'Bucardo' which is a wild goat that only was found in the Aragonees Pyrenees.
What they did there, was pick a sample tissue form the last member (who had died a year after they took the sample) and put the DNA into an egg from a goat. That egg is like 'fertilized' egg, so they just put into a goat and the pregnancy begins.
They manage to get a born alive female, but unfortunately died some minutes after the birth.
This was the first time when an extinct spice became unextinct, which is cool. At the same time, not all the genetic material is from a Bucardo because contains DNA from the goat (in the mitochondria).
So, I searched the quaggas project, and what I see is that they are doing selective breading to get the features of quaggas from an initial population of Zebra. This is probably how the process to have happened when Zebras and quaggas started to evolve differently. Probably due to a physical barrier, a small reduced group of zebras become isolated from the bigger group.
As the smaller group started to reproduce among them, so physical characteristics that were pretty rare become more prominent in each generation, until they become the main feature.
If the extinction hadn't occurred, maybe zebras and quaggas would be two different species of the same family.
The project seems cool, but I see a big flaw. My main concern is that they started with a very limited number of zebras, so all the descendants can be traced to the samemembers.
In a few generations, all the population will be inbred, which accentuates all the characteristics, not only the lack of strips on some parts of their body, but also other defects. Inbreeding has also been proved to accentuate mental problems, but let's see what happens.
The reason that those 'quaggas-like' zebras are going to be different from the actual quagas is because the zebra population, they are using is already different from the one that originated the quaggas because of the evolution.
Thanks for sharing this info, it was cool, and I learned something from the zebras.
Sorry if this is boring or too technical 😅😅😅.
