One company says Dolly the sheep, as most assume, was the first cloned animal. But another insists that its handiwork, Gene the cow, was the original.

A third firm, Worcester-based Advanced Cell Technology Inc., calls the debate irrelevant because its creations, cow clones George and Charlie, won the company the key U.S. patent to animal cloning.

George and Charlie and Dolly and Gene have given rise to a barnyard squabble between the three companies, culminating in a legal clash over ownership of the animal cloning patent and the potentially lucrative business it could bring.