The lamb clone grazes with its domestic foster mother
Scientists have revealed the existence of the first surviving clone of an endangered mammal.
The animal is a European mouflon lamb, a rare breed of sheep found on Sardinia, Corsica and Cyprus.
Several attempts have been made to clone endangered species but until now they have ended in failure.
The mouflon lamb, which is being cared for at a wildlife rescue centre in Sardinia, is now about six months old.
It was made by a European team led by Pasqualino Loi of the University of Teramo, Italy.
Clone 'confirmed'
The domestic sheep was the first mammal to be cloned, in 1996. Since then, other farm animals, including pigs, goats and cattle, have been cloned.
The Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, which created Dolly, collaborated on the mouflon cloning project.
Genetic tests at the institute confirmed that the lamb was a genuine clone.
"It's the first successful surviving birth of an endangered cloned mammal," Roslin's Michael Clinton told BBC News Online.
The lamb was cloned from the genetic material from one of two ewes found dead at a wildlife rescue centre in Sardinia. DNA was extracted from the carcass and injected into the empty egg cell of a donor domestic sheep to create an embryo.
A surrogate mother, also a domestic sheep, then carried the lamb clone to term.
Genetic rescue
Many scientists believe cloning may be necessary to save endangered animals as a last resort.
The first endangered animal clone - a baby gaur - was born in the United States in January this year. But the baby bull, Noah, died within 48 hours of birth, from dysentery.
Another bid to clone a wild sheep - the argali - failed to produce live offspring. The mouflon cloning project shows that domestic cousins of rare breeds can be used as a source of live eggs or as surrogate mothers in cloning experiments.
"In the unlikely event that all the animals of an endangered species died out suddenly, if you could get the genetic material within 18-24 hours you could rescue the species," Dr Clinton told BBC News Online.
"This would be an argument to begin storing cells from species that are endangered and try to identify domestic species that are compatible," he added.
The research is reported in full in the journal Nature Biotechnology.