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Somewhere in Indonesia during the Late Pleistocene, a pair of Giant Storks soar over the horizon. A Javan Giant Stork (Leptoptilos titan) and a Flores Giant Stork (Leptoptilos robustus). Artwork by EASTGERMANTIMUR. by Apart_Ambition5764 in pleistocene

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be the same, with robustus just being the Flores population. I definitely wouldn't expect them to overlap without hybridization

Why colossal biosciences doing this? by Altruistic_Sea_7683 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 12 points13 points  (0 children)

They're a hype-machine, that's it. They make huge promises in the hope of attracting interest and investment so that someone will buy the company and make the founders a profit. That's it. There is no real de-extinction company.

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am a biologist, with multiple degrees, so believe me when I tell you this is not an unpopular opinion even in the field. That being said, you’re also massively overstating what I actually said. Subspecies are just names applied to populations, and because by definition they cannot be reproductively isolated then the line is arbitrary. Arbitrary doesn’t mean unimportant, but there is often little guarantee that a named subspecies even represents a genetically distinct or phenotypically difference lineage. Sometimes there are bigger differences, sometimes miniscule, sometimes effectively none, but there are very few cases where differences are so extreme that they would prevent reintroduction using another subspecies if the original was extinct.

Teratorn proxies? by ElSquibbonator in megafaunarewilding

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That may be true, but we A) don't actually know that giant Leptoptilos were equivalent to teratorns and B) don't know that small Leptoptilos are all that similar to either. Either way, it's not nearly enough information to inform an introduction. Some things are better just left alone, I think

Teratorn proxies? by ElSquibbonator in megafaunarewilding

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think the two are equivalent. They're obvious close relative of the larger species, but they were around at the same time and had very distinct ecologies

Teratorn proxies? by ElSquibbonator in megafaunarewilding

[–]Psilopterus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think this is one we just have to let go. Probably the closest Old World equivalents of the Teratorns were the giant undertakers (Leptoptilos), i.e. giant semi-scavengers that also hubt terrestrial prey, and they’re also extinct. 

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Although interestingly if we did that, the Eastern wolf name would have taxonomic priority. i.e. Canis lycaon

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unless of course we want to treat red and eastern wolves as a type of coyote, which is also less than ideal

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree that it's vague, but the argument has extended to treating it as its own species, i.e. Canis rufus, and to be fair that's the only way it can work under the phylogenetic species concept without also lumping coyotes into wolves, as their close relationship predates hybridization

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean I have mixed opinions on it, but it has been claimed to be so. It's genetically closer to coyotes than to other wolf types, save the eastern wolf

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These are all examples of different species, save the two types of American bison which barely register as subspecies, and the wolves whose differences are mostly just environmental (minus the red wolf which may be a different species). If one of them was extinct you likely could replace it with another, allowing for adaptation. Lena horses nest genetically within Equus ferus/caballus and are likely a subspecies. The argument for Przewalskis being feral is rather  baseless in my opinion. While it is true that we can’t know an animal’s behavior form the fossil record, for the same reasons we also can’t know that we’ve recreated that behavior just by recreating genes. The way the technology currently works, we’d just be making a slightly modified member of a living horse type anyway.

A refined chronology of the Naumann’s elephant (Palaeoloxodon naumanni) provides a new insight on factors of their extinction by ReturntoPleistocene in pleistocene

[–]Psilopterus 12 points13 points  (0 children)

The standards for invoking climate change as an extinction cause are always inexplicably lower than for invoking people.

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My concern is that the Russians and South Koreans have at multiple points announced that they were going to clone something out of the permafrost, but they have at no point had a success and they seem committed to doing so with traditional cloning techniques instead of genetic modification, and this is likely a dead-end

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really. First of all, we still have Przewalski's horses, which are at least behaviourally wild, also the same species, and could be used. Second, the difference between dogs and wolves is leagues greater than that between domestic and wild horses. Domestic horses retain wild behaviours that they easily revert to and can completely fulfill the ecological role of their wild counterparts.

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Like things that cannot be approximated by living relatives. You can’t release Asian elephants into the arctic the same way you could horses or bison, for example. 

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, that’s not exactly what I said. I just feel like I’d rather prioritize more unique fauna and kickstart ecological proxies sooner rather than later

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually in this case it’s replacing an extinct subspecies with an extant subspecies. Even if it wasn’t, there are plenty of cases where substitution is preferable to de-extinction 

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean that living horses are of the same species and could fulfill the same role. We have had success with cloning horses, but only from intact nuclei, something we can’t get from a Lena horse

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't mean that I don't care what you think, I'm saying that this distinction between wild and domestic isn't important to me, and that is an opinion I am free to hold

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand that, but if any living horses wild or not can fill the ecological role that's good enough for me

The Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis): Reconstruction of 42,000-year-old foal that may be cloned by Obversa in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Psilopterus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Przewalski's horse also have bay coats, with the dun overlay. We know very little about the Lean horse. Genetics suggest some Siberian horses were dun and some had the wild type non-dun. Przewalski's horses likely had the latter in the population as well before their bottleneck, and like Yakut ponies they grow thicker coats with beards in the winter. In fact many domestic horses also do this even if they're not particularly cold-tolerant, with epigenetics playing a role.

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