The de-extinction company known for its plans to resurrect the mammoth and Tasmanian tiger announces it will also bring back the dodo.
Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate.
“This announcement is really just the start of this project,” says Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist and a scientific advisory board member at Colossal Biosciences. Shapiro, also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied the dodo since the science of paleogenetics was in its infancy.
One of the biggest challenges in the reconstruction of the dodo is a problem for all avian genomics. With mammals, the process is like that used in the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first animal to be cloned successfully from and adult cells of an adult mammal. But, Shapiro says, “we can’t clone birds.” Cloning requires access to an egg cell that is ready for fertilization but not yet fertilized.
Beyond behavior, the dodo proxy must survive in a world that is significantly different from that of more than 300 years ago, when the dodo went extinct. Yet not much is known about how dodoes functioned in their ecosystem. The birds lived only in forests on Mauritius. They had no large predators. They were slow to reproduce, laying one egg per year. And it’s believed from ancient sailors’ reports that there were once thousands of them.
“The dodo is a good choice because the fetus development happens in a short time span inside an egg and not in a surrogate mother, unlike a mammoth, which would have to be gestated by an elephant for nearly two years,” Sinding says. “It would be slightly easier to work with a chick than with a thylacine cub.” The ethical question with the dodo, he adds, is “whether the money is well spent or if we should spend that money trying to preserve some other living pigeons that are almost extinct.
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