A study of the famous animal’s bones suggests the conventional wisdom about how clones age is probably wrong.

Dolly the sheep was the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, and like many firsts, she came to stand in for all of her kind.

So when scientists suspected she had short telomeres—stretches of DNA that normally shorten with age—people wondered if it was because she was cloned from an adult cell. When she started to limp at age five, headlines said that her arthritis “dents faith in cloning.” And when she died at age six—as the result of a common lung virus that also killed other sheep in her barn—her short life again became a parable about cloning. A certain narrative took hold.

A study of the famous animal’s bones suggests the conventional wisdom about how clones age is probably wrong.

Dolly the sheep was the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, and like many firsts, she came to stand in for all of her kind.

So when scientists suspected she had short telomeres—stretches of DNA that normally shorten with age—people wondered if it was because she was cloned from an adult cell. When she started to limp at age five, headlines said that her arthritis “dents faith in cloning.” And when she died at age six—as the result of a common lung virus that also killed other sheep in her barn—her short life again became a parable about cloning. A certain narrative took hold.