“It would be crazy to think the solution was to bring back a proxy.”īen Lamm, the co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the company – whose attempts on mammoths and thylacine have not yet produced new animals – was raising a further $150m (£122m) from investors to pursue its research on the dodo. “What we are trying to do is to isolate the genes that distinguish the dodo,” she said. But she warned that the revived dodo could never be an exact replacement for what has been made extinct. She said there were hundreds of dodos in collections around the world, meaning it had been possible to sequence the dead bird’s genome. The researchers will be able to work with pigeon eggs, and use genetic material from pigeons that can be modified to reflect key traits of the dodo, including its flightlessness.īut this will also be technically challenging, as no one has yet managed to use gene-editing for birds in this way.īeth Shapiro, lead palaeogeneticist at Colossal, told the Guardian she had been fascinated by the dodo for more than two decades, since pursuing a degree in Oxford in 1999 where she saw a preserved dodo as a museum exhibit, and tried to persuade the museum to let her extract its DNA. Performing the same technique on an egg-laying bird should be less stressful for the donor species. It could take many pregnancies in practice to create viable offspring from such a method. With the mammalian species the technique requires implanting gene-editing material into the reproductive system of an existing relative of the species, such as an elephant in the case of the mammoth. This could bypass at least some of the ethical dilemmas for scientists. But the dodo would be its first bird, which is significant as it means changing the gene editing technique to accommodate an external egg. However, there is a fierce debate among biologists over whether this sort of research should be pursued.Ĭolossal Biosciences, the gene editing company involved, has already embarked on projects to revive the woolly mammoth and the thylacine. The scientists in question said their work, beyond providing an insight into the extinct dodo’s existence, could help inform the conservation of rare species that are not yet extinct. Still, being in the same building as a real dodo is closer than most people have gotten in the past 350 years.Dodos are most closely related to pigeons, according to sequencing of the proverbially dead bird’s genome. Unless you’re a credentialed scientist or researcher, the closest you’ll probably be able to get is the replica of the remains on display at the Ashmolean. The remains are typically only available for research for example, scientists conducted DNA tests on the foot several years ago and discovered the dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon. The rest of the body was burned, lost forever to the annals of history. By 1755, the museum discovered that mites and other bugs had destroyed everything but the dodo’s head and one foot. Sadly, the taxidermied dodo was neglected. When Tradescant passed away in 1662, his collection went to his friend Elias Ashmole, who relocated it to the now-famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. When she died, she was stuffed and given to John Tradescant Sr., a naturalist who collected interesting specimens. It’s believed the mummified head came from a dodo once displayed in London as a public attraction. And that’s because the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has the world’s only soft-tissue dodo specimen in existence.įrisbii via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 In fact, some of the earliest images of the dodo, dating back to 1598, show a much thinner, almost athletic bird.ĭespite all of the misleading information out there, there is one thing about dodos we’re certain we know: what its head looked like. Today, some researchers believe the traditional depiction of the dodo may have been a product of artistic license, because its skeleton couldn’t have supported such weight. To add insult to injury, our depiction of dodos as strange, awkwardly-shaped birds may not even accurate-the skeletons in most museums are made of bones scavenged from different birds, so it’s difficult to know how close we get with our modern-day representations.īecause the dodo was extinct before cameras were invented, we can only rely on paintings and illustrations to help inform our current understanding of the flightless bird. The last dodo sighting was reported in 1662, and in 1680, the bird was declared officially extinct.
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