#DODO BIRD EXTINCTION HOW TO#

The proxy bird will need to figure out how to survive without other members of its species to learn from. It’s hard.”Įven if the scientists overcome the technical challenges and create an animal with genes like a dodo, it might not behave like one. “I’ve been trying for about ten years to culture germ cells from other bird species. “That’s the big, hard part jumping from chicken species, which many labs in the world do, to other bird species,” Mike McGrew, who does avian gene editing at the University of Edinburgh and is on Colossal’s scientific advisory board, says to CNN. This technique has worked to breed chickens, but the dodo project is new territory. Next, they hope to remove germ cells from an egg of a pigeon, edit the genes to make them more dodo-like and implant the cells back into a pigeon egg, Shapiro tells CNN’s Katie Hunt. They have already successfully sequenced the extinct bird’s genome from ancient DNA.

To recreate some version of the dodo, the scientists plan to edit genes from the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative. “It’s pretty clear to people like me that thylacine or mammoth de-extinction is more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science.” “De-extinction is a fairytale science,” Jeremy Austin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Liam Mannix last year. In the meantime, other researchers are skeptical that the company can accomplish what it has set out to do. They are still developing the genetic processes needed to do so, writes MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado. In this way, it might engineer an animal that fills an ecological role similar to the dodo’s, per Wired’s Matt Reynolds.īut the scientists are still a long way off from achieving such a breakthrough with the dodo-or even with the mammoth or thylacine. Now, Colossal claims it can bring back the large flightless bird by editing the genomes of its living relatives. Once, dodos were denizens of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, but human explorers and their introduced animals hunted them to extinction by the end of the 17th century. “It’s the poster child, in a sad way, for how human habitat alteration can drive species to extinction.” “I’ve always been fascinated with the dodo,” Beth Shapiro, the lead paleogeneticist at Colossal, tells Vice’s Becky Ferreira. On Tuesday, the company, called Colossal Biosciences, added a third animal to its de-extinction bucket list: the dodo bird. Over the past year and a half, a biotechnology company has made headlines with its ambitious plans to genetically recreate members of two extinct species-the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.

Dodo bird extinction