A FAMILY OF THREE CHRISTMAS RATS AIPHA RAT, RENTON RAT & RAT A TAT.

Product Information

Flannery, Tim & Schouten, Peter (2001). A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-87113-797-5.

a b Harper, Francis (1945). Extinct and vanishing mammals of the Old World. New York: American Committee for International Wild Life Protection. pp.206–208.Even if gene-editing were perfected, replica animals created with the technique would thus have certain critical deficiencies. I am not doing de-extinction, but I think it's a really interesting idea, and technically it's really exciting," senior author Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP.

Gilbert said old DNA was like a book that has gone through a shredder, while the genome of a modern species is like an intact "reference book" that can be used to piece together the fragments of its degraded counterpart. Wyatt KB, Campos PF, Gilbert MT, Kolokotronis SO, Hynes WH, etal. (2008). "Historical mammal extinction on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) correlates with introduced infectious disease". PLOS ONE. 3 (11): e3602. Bibcode: 2008PLoSO...3.3602W. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003602. PMC 2572834. PMID 18985148. Gilbert admitted that, while the science was fascinating, he had mixed feelings on de-extinction projects. Before the early 1900s, if it walked like a Christmas Island rat and talked like a Christmas Island rat, it probably was a Christmas Island rat. But if one of these now-extinct rats ever walks the Earth again, it will most likely be a genetically modified Norway brown rat. And the rodent won’t be as similar to the Christmas Island rat as some would hope, a new study finds.

CREATE THE PERFECT COSY HOME THIS CHRISTMAS WITH FESTIVE HOMEWARE UPDATES FROM JUST £2.99 AT ALDI  

The two species diverged around 2.6 million years ago: close in evolutionary time, but not close enough to fully reconstruct the lost species' full genome.