Scientists want to resurrect the Dodo, the famous bird that many consider ‘dumb’

The dodo is one of the most famous extinct creatures on the planet.but Is there any chance that he can come back to life? Well, with advances in science and thanks to the first successful sequencing of the flightless bird’s genome last year, experts believe it’s possible to bring it back. This bird is remembered for having appeared in the Disney Pixar movie “Up”.

American startup Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas, Texas, has just revealed plans to ‘de-extinguish’ 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 accomplish the feat, the scientists first had to sequencing the complete dodo genome from bone samples and other fragments. Then they genetically edited 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 modified cell has to be used to create an embryo, in the same way as Dolly the sheep in 1996, and carry a living surrogate mother to term. Scientists expect the chick that hatches to resemble something between a Nicobar pigeon and a dodo.

The goal is for it to be born within the next six years. However, the expert leading the dodo extinction project, paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro, warned that it wouldn’t be easy to recreate a ‘real, living, breathing animal’ in the shape of a one meter tall bird.

It was his team that sequenced the bird’s entire genome for the first time in March 2022, after spending years struggling to find sufficiently well-conserved 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 to have some Dodo DNA, How do I transform that cell into a real, living, breathing 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 it with birds because of the complexities of their reproductive pathways.”

The dodo gets its name from the Portuguese word for ‘fool’, after the colonialists mocked his apparent lack of fear of human hunters. It also became prey to cats, dogs, and pigs that had been brought over with sailors exploring the Indian Ocean.

Its last confirmed sighting was in 1662 after Dutch sailors first saw the species just 64 years earlier, in 1598. (I)