Dead as a Dodo: Company Invests $150M in Project to Bring the Dodo Back to Life

Editor/

The dodo is one of the most famous extinct creatures on the planet — but is there a chance it could be brought back to life?

Well, with advances in science and thanks to the first successful sequencing of the flightless bird’s entire genome last year, experts think that’s a possibility.

US startup Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas, Texas, has just revealed plans to ‘de-extinct’ the dodo more than 350 years after it was wiped out from the island of Mauritius in the 17th century.

The company will inject $150 million into the new project, which will go hand-in-hand with previously announced ventures to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger.

To achieve the feat, scientists first had to sequence the dodo’s entire genome from bone specimens and other fragments, which has now been done.

Next, they will have to gene-edit the skin cell of a close living relative, which in the dodo’s case is the Nicobar pigeon, so that its genome matches that of the extinct bird.

This genetically-altered cell then has to be used to create an embryo – in the same way as Dolly the Sheep in 1996 – and brought to term in a living surrogate mother.

Scientists hope that the chick that hatches will resemble something between the Nicobar pigeon and the dodo.

They’re aiming for it to be born within the next six years. 

However, the expert leading the dodo de-extinction project – paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro – cautioned that it would not be easy to recreate a “living, breathing, actual animal” in the form of the 3ft (one metre) tall bird.

It was her team that sequenced the bird’s entire genome for the first time in March 2022, having spent years struggling to find well enough preserved DNA.  

“Mammals are simpler,” said Professor Shapiro, of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“If I have a cell and it’s living in a dish in the lab and I edit it so that it has a bit of Dodo DNA, how do I then transform that cell into a whole living, breathing, actual animal?

“The way we can do this is to clone it, the same approach that was used to create Dolly the Sheep, but we don’t know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways.”

She added, “So there needs to be another approach for birds and this is one really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction.

“There are groups working on different approaches for doing that and I have little doubt that we are going to get there but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don’t have for mammals.”

The dodo gets its name from the Portuguese word for ‘fool’, after colonialists mocked its apparent lack of fear of human hunters. 

It also became prey for cats, dogs and pigs that had been brought with sailors exploring the Indian Ocean.

Because the species lived in isolation on Mauritius for hundreds of years, the bird was fearless, and its inability to fly made it easy prey.

Its last confirmed sighting was in 1662 after Dutch sailors first spotted the species just 64 years earlier in 1598.

Since launching in September 2021, Colossal Biosciences has raised a total of $225 million (£181 million) in funding to support its initiatives.

Professor Shapiro, who is also the company’s lead paleogeneticist, said, “The dodo is a prime example of a species that became extinct because we – people – made it impossible for them to survive in their native habitat.”

0