Scientists plan to revive a bird that has been extinct since the seventeenth century

 Scientists plan to revive a bird that has been extinct since the seventeenth century

The dodo, a flightless bird, was first spotted in the 1500s by Portuguese sailors and had disappeared by 1681.

No other animal is as closely associated with extinction as the dodo, a strange-looking flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean until the late seventeenth century. The arrival of sailors brought with them invasive species such as rats and practices such as hunting. They wiped out the dodo, which showed no fear of humans, with extinction in just a few decades. Now, a team of scientists wants to bring back the dodo in a bold initiative that includes advances in ancient DNA sequencing, gene-editing technology and synthetic biology. They hope the project will open up new technologies for bird conservation.

"It's clear that we are in the midst of an extinction crisis. Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said. Shapiro is a paleontologist at Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering startup founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lam and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who is working on equally ambitious projects to bring back woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers, or Tasmanian tigers.Shapiro said she has already completed a major first step in the project — the entire sequence of the dodo's genome from ancient DNA — based on genetic material extracted from the remains of a dodo in Denmark. The next step was to compare the genetic information with the closest relatives of the dodo birds in the pigeon family - the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Solitaire Rodrigues, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island near Mauritius. Shapiro said it was a process that would allow them to narrow down mutations in the genome "that make the dodo a dodo."

The skeleton of a dodo bird is on display in a museum in Mauritius.

Challenges to revive the dodo

However, the subsequent work necessary to revive the animal - programming cells from a living relative of the dodo with the DNA of the lost bird - will be noticeably more difficult. Shapiro said she hopes to adapt a current technique used that includes primitive germ cells, embryonic precursors of sperm and eggs, which have already been used to create a chicken from a duck. She explained that the approach involves removing primitive gemstone cells from the egg and growing them in the laboratory and modifying the cells with the desired genetic traits before injecting them back into the egg at the same developmental stage.Even if the team succeeds in this high-stakes endeavor, they will not make a carbon version of the dodo that lived four centuries ago, but in a modified hybrid formula. However, Shapiro said mastering these synthetic biology tools would have broader implications for bird protection. The techniques could allow scientists to transfer specific genetic traits between bird species to help protect them as habitats shrink and the climate warms. "This technology that works in chickens.... "It would be amazing to make this work in a lot of different birds across the bird life tree because that would have a huge impact on bird conservation," Shapiro said."If we find that something provides immunity to a disease that harms populations, and you know the genetic changes underlying that immunity or that ability to fight that disease – maybe we can use these tools to transmit that even between related species," she added. Mike McGraw, senior lecturer and personal chair of bird breeding techniques at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, described the project as a "moon launch of synthetic biology". His work involves transforming commercial laying hens into substitutes for rare chicken breeds that are revived from frozen primitive germ cells."The idea is that you should now be able to do this with types of pigeons. McGraw, who was not directly involved in the dodo project but is part of Colossal's scientific advisory board, said this is the biggest and difficult part of the transition from chicken species, which many labs in the world do, to other bird species. "I have been trying for about 10 years to grow germ cells from other bird species. Say.

Beth Shapiro, left, will lead the scientific effort to revive the dodo at Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lam, to the right.

Investing in Extinction

Whether Colossal and its team of scientists ultimately succeed in their quest for the return of the dodo and other extinct creatures, extinction elimination projects, and the technological breakthroughs they may generate, investors are excited. Colossal also announced on Tuesday that it has raised an additional $150 million, bringing the total funding raised since the company's launch in 2021 to $225 million. However, critics say the huge sums involved could be better used to protect 400 or so species of birds, and many other animals and plants listed as endangered."There are many things that desperately need our help. and money. Why would you bother trying to save something that has been a long time ago, when there are so many desperate things out right now? Julian Hume, a bird paleontologist at London's Natural History Museum, who studies the dodo.

The dodo is often portrayed as fleshy and undesirable. Hume believes that this illustration by the Mughal artist Ustad Mansur from about 1625 is the most accurate.

Dodo myths  

Hume said that little is known about the dodo and that many legends surround this creature. Even the origin of its name is mysterious, although it is believed to stem from the sound of the call that the bird is said to have made - a low-voiced sound resembling a pigeon. Millions of years ago, the ancestors of the dodo lived in Southeast Asia, and when sea levels were low, the island jumped its way to Mauritius, where it became isolated without predators once sea level rose.

The dodo has always been a source of fascination since its discovery. She appears as a character in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as explained by John Tennell.

"The trip is very expensive (in terms of energy). Why bother preserving it if you don't need it? All the fruit and food is on the ground, and when you become flightless, you can become big. That's what the dodo did, it got bigger and bigger and bigger," Hume said. According to a 3D digital model of a Hume bird developed based on a skeleton from the Durban Museum of Natural Science in South Africa, the dodo was about 70 cm (2.3 ft) long and weighed about 15 to 18 kg (33 to 39 lb).The model revealed that the dodo was most likely more graceful than the illustrations depicting it as an unwanted fat bird. We have a dodo to thank for introducing the idea of extinction to the world – a sad feat that is still felt in the phrase "dead as a dodo". Back in the seventeenth century, before the first dinosaur fossils were widely known, "the concept of extinction did not exist. Everything was God's making and they were here forever. Hume said the idea that something could be erased was not present in anyone's vocabulary. "It was such an unusual bird, even at the time of discovery," he added. They quickly disappeared. So when people wanted to know more about them, there was nothing left of them."