On Nov. 15, 1984 Allan Wilson and Russell Higuchi of the University of CA at Berkeley become the first to clone genes from an extinct species. The scientists cloned genes from the preserved skin of a quagga, a form of zebra that has been extinct for a hundred years.

DNA was extracted from this tissue in amounts approaching 1% of that expected from fresh muscle, and that the DNA was of relatively low molecular weight. Among the many clones obtained from the quagga DNA, two containing pieces of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) were sequenced. These sequences, comprising 229 nucleotide pairs, differ by 12 base substitutions from the corresponding sequences of mtDNA from a mountain zebra, an extant member of the genus Equus. The study was published in Nature.