The first extinct animal ever cloned was the Pyrenean ibex, a wild mountain goat also called the bucardo. In 2003, a team of Spanish scientists produced a live clone of the species, making it the only extinct animal to ever be brought back to life, even briefly. The clone survived just minutes after birth before dying of respiratory failure.
The Last Bucardo
The Pyrenean ibex once roamed the mountain ranges of the Iberian Peninsula, but centuries of hunting and habitat loss drove the population to near zero by the late 1990s. The very last known individual was a female named Celia, who died on January 6, 2000, when a falling tree branch struck her. Before her death, however, scientists had the foresight to take a skin biopsy from Celia in 1999 and freeze the tissue sample for potential future use. That frozen sample of skin cells became the genetic foundation for the entire cloning effort.
How the Clone Was Created
The cloning team, led by José Folch at the Agrifood Research and Technology Centre of Aragon in Spain, used somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same basic technique used to create Dolly the sheep. They thawed Celia’s preserved skin cells and fused them with egg cells from domestic goats that had been emptied of their own DNA. The resulting embryos carried Celia’s complete genetic blueprint.
The scale of the effort was enormous, and the success rate was vanishingly small. Across two rounds of experiments, the team reconstructed 439 embryos and transferred them into 57 surrogate mothers, a mix of pure Spanish ibex and Spanish ibex-domestic goat hybrids. Only seven surrogates became pregnant. Six of those pregnancies failed. A single pregnancy went to term, producing one live female kid.
Seven Minutes of Life
The cloned bucardo was born alive, making it the first animal from an extinct species to draw breath. But the newborn had severe physical defects in its lungs, a problem not uncommon in cloned animals. She died of respiratory failure within minutes of being born. An examination confirmed that the lung tissue had developed abnormally, preventing the kid from breathing on her own.
The result was bittersweet. It proved that cloning from preserved cells of an extinct animal was technically possible. It also demonstrated just how far the technology needed to go before it could reliably produce healthy offspring. Out of hundreds of reconstructed embryos, only one live birth occurred, and that animal couldn’t survive.
Why Cloning Alone Can’t Revive a Species
Even if the bucardo clone had survived, it would have faced a fundamental biological problem: it was a genetic copy of a single individual. A viable population needs genetic diversity to adapt to disease, environmental changes, and other pressures over generations. Cloning one animal, or even several copies of the same animal, creates a population with an extremely narrow gene pool. That fragility would likely doom any cloned population over time.
There’s also a deeper issue. Cloning does nothing to fix the reasons a species went extinct in the first place. If habitat loss or hunting eliminated an animal, producing genetic copies in a lab doesn’t change the conditions waiting for them in the wild. A cloned species with no suitable habitat and no genetic variation is, in practical terms, still extinct.
Where De-Extinction Stands Now
No one has successfully repeated the bucardo experiment with another extinct species. But the idea of de-extinction has attracted significant investment and scientific talent. Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company, is currently working on projects to bring back the woolly mammoth (extinct for roughly 4,000 years), the Tasmanian tiger (extinct since 1936), and the dodo (gone since the late 1600s). In October 2024, Colossal also announced plans to revive the ivory-billed woodpecker, a striking bird once found in the southern United States. The nonprofit Revive & Restore is pursuing the passenger pigeon, planning to create a hybrid using genes from the closely related band-tailed pigeon.
Most of these projects rely on gene editing rather than straightforward cloning. The goal is to modify the DNA of a living relative so that it closely resembles the extinct species, then breed a population over multiple generations. This approach sidesteps the need for perfectly preserved cells from the extinct animal, but it also means the result isn’t a true replica. It’s a hybrid carrying some genes from the lost species.
Scientists increasingly acknowledge this distinction. A 2025 analysis in Yale Environment 360 noted that many researchers now agree full de-extinction isn’t truly possible with current tools. What is possible is creating animals that are genetically very close to lost species. The tauros project in Europe, for example, has used selective breeding to produce cattle that share well over 99 percent of their genes with the aurochs, a wild ancestor of domestic cattle that went extinct in 1627. About 810 tauros are alive today, with roughly 350 living in conservation areas across Europe alongside wolves and bears.
These projects have also generated unexpected practical benefits. Colossal’s mammoth research has contributed to the development of a vaccine against a herpes virus that kills young elephants. Its dodo work has informed a conservation strategy for the endangered Mauritius pink pigeon, using genetic editing to counteract the effects of inbreeding. Whether or not a woolly mammoth ever walks the tundra again, the science behind the attempt is already helping species that are still here.