At the San Diego Zoo, in Southern California, little Kurt looks and acts like any other baby horse. He likes to play, pushes against anything that gets in his way, and runs to his mother for milk when he is hungry. But the 2-month-old differs from every other baby horse in the world in a major way: Kurt is a clone. He was created in a laboratory.

Scientists used cells taken from a male Przewalski’s horse in 1980. The cells had been frozen for the last forty years. The scientists also took an egg from a female horse of a different breed. Then, they removed the egg’s nucleus and replaced it with the cells from the Przewalski’s horse. San Diego Zoo officials say Kurt is the first cloned Przewalski’s horse, a rare and endangered breed.

The zoo sees Kurt’s birth as a major step in efforts to reestablish the population of the Przewalski’s horse, also known as the Asiatic Wild Horse or Mongolian Wild Horse. The small, thickset horses are believed to have Przewalski’s horses take their official name from Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski, who found a skull and skin of one and shared it with a Russian museum.

The Smithsonian says Przewalski’s horses are the only one true wild horses left in the world. It says that wild horse groups in North America and Australia are not truly wild because their ancestors were horses that escaped human owners.