World's Oldest Liquid Blood May Resurrect Extinct Horse
When "Jurassic Park" opened in theaters in 1993, many people were hopeful that dinosaurs would come back to life through cloning techniques. While this still seems unlikely, another extinct but much more recent animal may come back to life: Lenskaya's horse. This is supposed to be the breed of fossilized foal found in Siberia in August last year.
The animal would be at most one or two weeks old when it died about 42, 000 years ago! It was found incredibly intact, supposedly with traces of liquid blood and intact hair. The Lenskaya breed lived in the coldest Yakutia region of Russia during the Upper Paleolithic, late Stone Age.
Researchers at the Mammoth Museum at Northeast Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia, explain that the frozen mud terrain on which the animal was preserved helped keep organs and tissues in excellent condition. Liquid blood has been extracted from the foal's heart vessels and is already being called “the oldest in history”!
According to Dr. Semyon Grigoryev of the Mammoth Museum, even muscle tissues have their traditional reddish color. “We can say it's the best preserved Ice Age animal ever found in the world, ” adds Grigoryev.
The ball has now passed to scientists from Sooam Biotech University and Foundation, who believe they have succeeded in “resurrecting” Lenskaya horses. However, 20 unsuccessful attempts have already been made. As the breed is extinct, it will need to sequence the foal's complete genome, but supplementing it with its closest living relative, in this case, Jeju cavolos of Korea, descended from the Mongolian horses, one of the toughest and oldest races. of the equine lineage.
