Dead as a dodo...alive soon

Bringing back birds and beasts that slipped into extinction

- POOJA BIRAIA

The year 1681 was the last time mankind saw the dodo before it became the universal symbol for extinction. The flightless bird, endemic to Mauritius, was said to be so trusting that it would walk right up to Dutch sailors—who found it on the island in the early 1600s—and offer them its nest. As it had no natural predators, it had no reason to doubt the humans. It was wrong. Within decades, hunting, deforestation and damage caused by animals that the humans introduced to the island wiped out the dodo.

Now, centuries later, the same humans are trying to create a new version of the dodo, one that is not “dumb”. And, it won't be alone. Scientists are also working on bringing back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, a Tasmanian marsupial last seen in the early 19th century. Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based “de-extinction company” that uses genetic engineering to “revive” extinct species, says the dodo will be with us in 2028. Its team of scientists has been assembling and sequencing the dodo genome (the total amount of DNA in an organism) using DNA extracted from a skull in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Children of the 1990s will remember how scientists used mosquito DNA to bring back dinosaurs in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. This, though, seems more realistic.

“Our mission is to make extinction a thing of the past,” Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist and chief science officer at Colossal, tells THE WEEK. “About half of the species on earth are threatened with extinction in the next 50 to 100 years, and much of this is due to changes in habitat because of humans. We should be improving and increasing the number of tools and options available to us in terms of how we might protect species, genetic diversity and ecosystems.”