The dodo is dead. That’s kind of his claim to fame. Had a bit of an awkward mouth. Couldn’t fly. Poor relationship with the pigeon. Generally mediocre all around, really. But it did manage to waddle into the history books due to an unfortunate extinction event.
However, like a rather clumsy phoenix, the dodo can rise again. In 2023, Colossal Biosciences, a gene editing company that has already made headlines for its plans to woolly mammothannounced that it is trying to bring the dodo “back to life”. At the time, Beth Shapiro, the chief paleogeneticist at the Texas-based startup, told the Guardian that she had been fascinated by the dodo since seeing a preserved specimen in an Oxford museum in 1999, and had been trying to get the museum to persuaded her to extract his DNA. Which was certainly enterprising of her.
While there are obviously significant challenges to reviving extinct animals, having celebrities cough up millions of dollars to fund these efforts is not one of them. Last week Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his partner, producer Fran Walsh, became the latest professors to invest millions (in this case a cool $10m) in Colossal Biosciences.
On the face of it, this may seem like a colossal waste of money. But there may be a method to this madness: one genetics expert told Bloomberg that generating hype — and resources — through plans to revive extinct animals could help Colossal solve more pressing conservation problems in the short term.
Still, I remain skeptical. “The dodo is a symbol of man-made extinction,” said Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm AP last year. Right. And if this revival effort goes anything like Jurassic Park, the resurrected dodo could become a symbol of human hubris. Sometimes you just have to let sleeping dodos lie.
