yep, in Scots: it is a bo in Gaelic a cu being a dog.
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Bò Ghàidhealach
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Indeed…to distinguish it from those very ordinary cows in the south
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How about this?
Blue Bird of Paradise from Papua New Guinea.
This is the male mating call. Which sounds like a sci-fi special effect of a flying saucer taking off …
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More kitty cats please.
We’re on that right away.
After all, it’s not as though you can’t find any and post them for others to enjoy.
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These are dire wolf puppies that have been cloned from fossil material that is thousands of years old.
I think they are pretty cute.
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Not so fast. Cute, yes, but they are not really direwolves:
Has the Dire Wolf Truly Been Resurrected? We Asked the Experts
[…]
No, it has not. What Colossal Biosciences has done is to genetically modify gray wolves to perhaps give them a slightly more dire wolf-like appearance. It’s wrong to say they have brought the dire wolf species back from extinction, or that these animals are dire wolves in any sense. It’s a technically impressive experiment to genetically modify gray wolves, but the company is massively exaggerating what this is and what it means.
[…]
The simple answer is no.
So what’s happened is that they genetically modified gray wolves, which are a close relative, albeit six million years ago—these animals had a common ancestor. And what they’ve done is they’ve looked at the genome of the dire wolf and they looked at the genome of the gray wolf and they’ve identified a relatively small number of genetic differences relating to coat color and head size and general body size. And they’ve engineered those traits into a gray wolf. So you end up with a genetically engineered gray wolf, which is kind of a hybrid. And what we’ve seen is that they have white color coats and they’ll end up being a bit bigger, perhaps, than the average wolf.
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Yes and from what I understand a couple of the identified genes from the Dire Wolf genome cause blindness and deafness in gray wolves, so they didn’t even directly use those, they engineered something that they think conveyed certain traits without the side effects. I really got the impression it was a “best guess” sort of operation, providing results so they had something to crow about. The DNA samples came from a fairly old skull and from a rather more recent tooth. My guess is they were not complete or particularly high quality. It just gave them some clues.
I understand the skepticism. A lot of my credulty probably comes from my sense of collective guilt at being a member of the human race . . . as we have driven so many magnificent animals into extinction.
But I also have to question my understanding of the science behind these claims.
If humans and chimpanzees share about 98% of our genetic material, then it seems–at least to me–that if we want to resurrect an extinct chimpanzee, that we could take a human genome and splice the 2% that’s different in order to recreate a faithful reproduction of the extinct chimpanzee with a genome indistinguishable from an original chimpanzee.
So, I was under the impression that this is what was done with the dire wolves.
Am I wrong?
My daughter’s kitten.
He was discovered in a bush outside her flat and clearly not long for this world (until she rescued him).
UK Atheist
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Has he got a name yet?