Colossal Biosciences first announced plans to bring back the woolly mammoth two years ago. On Tuesday, the company said it also wants to revive the Dodo.
“The dodo is a symbol of man-made extinction,” said Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences.
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The last dodo, a flightless bird about the size of a turkey, was killed in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean in 1681.
Founded in 2021, the Dallas-based company announced Tuesday that it has secured an additional $150 million in funding. It has raised $225 million so far from a range of investors – including In-Q-tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm that invests in technology.
No income can be expected from the return of the dodo, Mr. Lamm admitted. However, the tools and techniques the company will develop to achieve this could have other applications, including in human health, he said.
For example, Colossal Technologies is currently investigating what is sometimes called an “artificial womb,” he said.
The dodo’s closest relative is the Nicobar pigeon, said Beth Shapiro, a molecular biologist who works at Colossal and has been studying the dodo for 20 years.
Her team plans to study the genetic differences between the dodo and the Nicobar pigeon to understand “what are the genes that really make a dodo a dodo,” she said.
The team could then try to modify the cells of a Nicobar pigeon to look a little more like the cells of a dodo. The modified cells could then be introduced into the developing eggs of other species, such as chickens and pigeons, to produce birds, which Shapiro said would then naturally lay dodo eggs.
However, because animals are a product of their genes and their environment, which has changed a lot since the 17th century, Ms Shapiro warned that it is “not possible to recreate a 100% faithful copy of something that no longer exists”.
Other researchers wonder if we should even try, and if the funds spent on reversing the extinction shouldn’t instead be used to protect the species that still live among us.
“There’s a real danger in saying that if we destroy nature, we can put the pieces back together — because we can’t,” Stuart Pimm, an independent ecologist at Duke University, told Colossal.
“And where on earth could we put a mammoth but in a cage?” asked Mr. Pimm, remembering that the mammoth ecosystem is long gone.
Conveniently, experts point out that animals from captive breeding programs can have trouble adapting to life in the wild. It helps if they have examples of wild animals of their kind, which obviously wouldn’t be the case with dodos or mammoths, said Boris Worm, an ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who is also unrelated to Colossal.
“Preventing species from becoming extinct should be our priority, and in many cases it costs less,” he said.