It’s one of the most famous extinct animals of all time, ruthlessly hunted to extinction by humans in just a few decades.
Now, scientists are edging closer to bringing the famous dodo back to its original home of Mauritius, the island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
US startup Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas, Texas, is using stem cell technology and genome editing to create a modern approximation of the species.
At a cost of over $225 million (£180 million), it is ‘de-extincting’ the dodo more than 350 years after it was wiped out from Mauritius by European explorers.
And Colossal Biosciences isn’t stopping there – it also wants to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger.
Scientists are using stem cell technology to bring back the extinct species – more than 350 years after it was wiped out
Most people believe that the dodo was a fat, ungainly bird, but as it has been extinct since the late 1600s, nobody really knows exactly what the dodo looked like
Colossal Biosciences has partnered with The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to find a suitable location for the first flock of dodos once they’ve been grown in the lab.
Before it was wiped out in the 17th century, the flightless bird was endemic to the forests of the island.
‘The dodo, a bird intimately woven in the DNA of Mauritius, is also sadly iconic for the role mankind played in its extinction,’ said Vikash Tatayah, director of conservation at Mauritian Wildlife Foundation.
‘It also symbolises efforts to prevent species extinctions.
‘We are so grateful for Colossal’s technologies and the promise to return this iconic species, extinct since the 1680s, to its native environment.’
In preparation for releasing the regenerated dodos into the wild, the two partners will collaborate on the ‘restoration of ecosystems’ through invasive species removal, revegetation, and community awareness efforts.
Scientists have already achieved the monumental feat of sequencing the full genome of the extinct species, from bone specimens and other fragments.
The next step is 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.
The aim is to make the genome match that of the extinct bird’s, or get as close to it as possible, with the help of gene editing tool Crispr-Cas9.
This is a technique that can ‘cut and paste’ small sections of DNA, meaning scientists can delete or edit certain genes so that they more accurately represent the animal they are looking to recreate.
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 the first lab-grown dodo to be born within this decade.
Scientists want to bring the dodo home to Mauritius, the island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean
The Nicobar pigeon (pictured) is the closest living relative of the dodo, found on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India
The dodo gets its name from the Portuguese word for ‘fool’, after colonialists mocked its apparent lack of fear of human hunters
The dodo, discovered by Europeans in 1598, was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
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.
Most people believe that the dodo was a fat, ungainly bird, but as it has been extinct since the late 1600s, nobody really knows exactly what the dodo looked like.
Oxford University Museum of Natural History is home to the only surviving remains of dodo soft tissue that exists anywhere in the world.
Scientists said the ‘Oxford dodo’ was blasted in the back of the head with a shotgun.
Pictured, part of the ‘Oxford dodo’ – the only surviving remains of dodo soft tissue that exists anywhere in the world
There’s also a dodo skull in the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum, and an upper jaw in the National Museum, Prague.
Now, these scarce fragments exist as a ‘symbol of man-caused extinction’, according to Colossal Biosciences.
‘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,’ said Professor Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist at the company.
‘Having focused on genetic advancements in ancient DNA for my entire career and as the first to fully sequence the dodo’s genome, I am thrilled to collaborate with Colossal and the people of Mauritius on the de-extinction and eventual re-wilding of the dodo.
‘I particularly look forward to furthering genetic rescue tools focused on birds and avian conservation.’
Professor Shapiro admitted that it will 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?
However, the expert leading the dodo de-extinction project – paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro (pictured left) – cautioned that it would not be easy to recreate a ‘living, breathing, actual animal’ in the form of the flightless bird. Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal is right
‘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.’
Other experts have questioned whether the new creation would really be a dodo at all.
‘There is nobody around to teach the dodo how to be a dodo,’ Mikkel Sinding, a paleogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, told Scientific American.
‘You can genome edit the hell out of something and say you have remade a species, but is it really the species?’
