Since the first animal, Dolly the sheep, was cloned in 1996, scientists been able to clone pigs, cattle, mice, rabbits, horses and cats.
But though many have tried, no one has ever managed to create a genetic double of a dog.
But now South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang and his team at Seoul National University have introduced Snuppy the puppy, an animal whose entire genome has come from a single cell from the ear of a three-year-old Afghan hound.
The arrival of Snuppy has surprised rival cloners in the U.S.and produced some rather grudging admiration.
The achievement of the Korean scientists has finally proved that cloning a dog is possible, but not that easy.
John Sperling, the billionaire who co-founded the Genetic Savings & Clone (GS&C), in the U.S., has spent seven years and more than $19 million trying without success to clone a dog.
Another researcher Mark Westhusin, of Texas A&M University, whose team cloned a cat at its second attempt in 2001, abandoned the dog-cloning project years ago.
George Seidel Jr. of Colorado State University, a reproductive physiologist, refused to even try, when the company approached him.