Despite her fame as 'the first animal to be cloned', Dolly the Sheep was actually beaten to that title by another sheep in 1984, 12 years before her birth. She was however, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, which was thought of as an impossibility at the time. She shot to fame, and was considered one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the year. Not bad for a sheep.

Dolly was born to a surrogate mother on 5th July 1996, although she technically had three - with one sheep to provide the egg and another to provide the DNA.

Dolly gave birth naturally to six lambs herself over a period of three years, and although she was sadly euthanised at six years old after developing a progressive lung disease, (a particular danger for sheep kept indoors), her legacy lives on. Since her successful cloning, major steps have been made in stem cell research, including the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, allowing researchers to obtain pluripotent stem cells without the use of an embryo.

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