Black-footed ferrets sired by males that died 8 years ago

A two-week-old black-footed ferret is pictured in its nesting box at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Va. on July 3, 2008. The kit was born on June 21 to a two-year-old mother and a father who had died in 2000. National Zoo reproductive scientists inseminated the female with frozen black-footed ferret semen stored in their genome resource bank -- a frozen repository of sperm and eggs of a variety of endangered species. Credit: Mehgan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo