The dodo has been extinct for nearly 400 years, but if a biosciences company can achieve their goal, it could come back into existence. That'll create its own set of problems, though.
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00:00The dodo is perhaps a quintessential example of the way humans have caused the extinction
00:04of various species throughout our history. After all, these birds were said to have possessed
00:08three characteristics which made them irresistible to the Dutch settlers who discovered them
00:11— plump, tasty, and dumb — which may or may not be true, but we'll get to that in
00:17a moment.
00:18Now, if the demise of this chubby little bird makes you shed a tear or two, I've got great
00:21news for you. This little guy may not be gone for good, after all. He may, in fact, be making
00:26a reappearance thanks to the work being done at Colossal Biosciences, an American de-extinction
00:31company.
00:32Yes, you heard that right. They are pursuing the de-extinction of certain species. I guess
00:37we've learned nothing from six rounds of Jurassic Park. And, listen, I hear you. The dodo bird
00:42is hardly on the same level as dangerous as the T. rex, but Colossal Biosciences is also
00:47working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the white rhinoceros, the Tasmanian tiger,
00:51and more. Is anyone else hearing Jeff Goldblum at this point?
00:55Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't
00:58stop to think if they should.
01:00Anyway, I digress. Let's get back to the humble dodo.
01:03First, a little backstory from the point of view of the dodo. It was the late 1500s. Dodos
01:08were minding their own business on the tiny island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar, when
01:13the Dutch arrived. The birds reportedly showed no fear of the fevolous weirdos. In fact,
01:18they walked right up to check them out. This proved to be a mistake.
01:21In an insultingly simplistic description of the dodo's demise, the settlers thought
01:25the 40-pound chickens looked delicious and eradicated the gullible dodo in the name of
01:29satisfying colonial hunger, or something suitably metaphorical.
01:33And even though they apparently weren't especially tasty, a single, chonky dodo could feed so
01:37many sailors that they were hunted in large numbers.
01:40That's right. They actually didn't taste good. A common palate description is greasy, so
01:46think duck. But it was also dry. Dry duck doesn't exactly scream high-class restaurant.
01:52But when you've been stuck on a boat for months, beggars can't be choosers.
01:56Anyway, the idea of bringing them back began to have short, scaly, chicken-like legs in
02:002002, when, according to Science, Colossal Biosciences' lead paleontologist Bess Shapiro
02:05and her team used dodo mitochondria to unlock the dodo's family tree. They discovered that
02:10the most dodo-like modern species are columbiformes, pigeons and doves. More specifically, the
02:16Nicobar pigeon from the Nicobar Islands west of Thailand are the dodo's closest genetic
02:20relatives.
02:21But this isn't 23andMe, so it took scientists until 2022 to map out the dodo's entire genome.
02:27And the next step is the big one — creating a dodo. Easier said than done, according to
02:32Shapiro, who explained,
02:33"...we can't clone birds."
02:35And you don't have to be a scientist to realize there's another problem. How the heck is a
02:39two-pound pigeon expected to lay a dodo-sized egg? Unsurprisingly, Shapiro has a plan, saying,
02:46The final version of dodo will emerge from a pigeon that has been engineered to be the
02:49size of a dodo, so the size of eggs will be consistent.
02:53But say that all works, and the first of many dodos is hatched. What then? Shapiro laid
02:58out the problem, explaining,
02:59If we're going to bring back something that's functionally equivalent to a dodo, then we
03:03will have to find, identify, or create habitats in which they're able to survive.
03:07I'm back, baby! I'm back!
03:11Why would anyone think that the dodo would fare better in the 21st century than it did
03:14in the 17th century? The bird only ever existed on Mauritius, but that Mauritius might as
03:18well have been a different planet. Once humans showed up, they altered the environment by
03:22introducing species like rats, pigs, and monkeys. Dodos laid just one large egg at a time, and
03:28because they formerly had no predators, they laid it on the ground. Rats, pigs, and monkeys
03:33love eggs. That's the key right there. It wasn't so much that the portly bird was dumb,
03:38but that their eggs were delicious. So that's the real reason the dodo went extinct.
03:43There were some other things that clearly didn't help. Settlers deforested the island
03:46to make room for plantations, which whittled away at the dodo's habitat. The 400 years
03:51of colonization isn't going to make a new dodo's survival any easier. The species would
03:55have to be massively protected.
03:58Then there's the social side. Postdoctoral researcher in paleogenomics at the University
04:02of Copenhagen, Michael Sinding, told Scientific American,
04:06There's nobody around to teach the dodo how to be a dodo. All joking aside, authentic
04:10dodo behavior is beyond the reach of scientists, unless they invented a time machine we don't
04:15know about.
04:16When it went extinct, nobody actually noticed. No one was really worried about preserving
04:20any information about it until it was too late.
04:23Project Dodo Do-Over is going to take some time, so don't plan your trip to the dodo
04:27theme park quite yet. First, they have to grow a giant pigeon, and while they're doing
04:31that, the scientists need to figure out what a dodo's world should look like. After all,
04:34we don't want to bring it back only to have the dodo go extinct all over again.