No one really knows what the dodo looked like. Quite simply because the extinction of Raphus cucullatus, the scholarly name of this bird belonging to the order Columbiformes, dates back to 1690, according to the scientific journal Nature. Twenty-eight years after its last confirmed sighting, in 1662, and reported by Volkert Evertsz, a Dutch sailor from Arnhem, a ship stranded on an islet off the coast of Mauritius. Of the bird, only a few bones remain today, at the Natural History Museum in Paris, in London, at the University of Oxford or at the Cantonal Geology Museum in Lausanne…
Not content with wanting to create woolly mammoth hybrids or resurrect the thylacine (also known as marsupial wolf or Tasmanian wolf), biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences set out to revive the dodo. Or at least, an identical version to the fictional character appearing in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Walt Disney’s cartoon (1951).
To do this, the firm has just raised 150 million dollars (about 137.5 million euros). By early 2022, Colossal had already raised $75 million from various investors, including the United States Innovative Technology Fund, Breyer Capital or In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. Biotech is now valued at some $1.5 billion: enough to help it develop its projects.
Researching the Closest Living Relative of the Dodo
“The dodo is a symbol of human-caused extinction,” Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal, a hub of which works specifically on genetic technologies related to birds, told The Associated Press. Bringing the dodo back to life will bring nothing to the company, he assures. But this research could have other applications in the field of human health. Colossal is notably developing tools to modify several parts of the genome simultaneously and is working on an “artificial womb” for its mammoth.
To carry out his project, Colossal is interested in the closest living relative of the dodo: the nicobar with camail, also called nicobar pigeon. Molecular biologist and Colossal Scientific Advisory Board member Beth Shapiro has been studying the dodo since the early 2000s. She spent years searching for its DNA and eventually found some in a specimen held at the Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen. .
With her team, she will now study the DNA differences between the nicobar pigeon and the dodo. Objective: to understand “what are the genes that really make a dodo a dodo”. Researchers can then attempt to modify nicobar camail cells to make them look like dodo cells using the Crispr-CAS9 genome editing technique.
It is possible to put the modified cells into developing eggs of other birds, such as pigeons or chickens, to create offspring which can in turn naturally produce dodo eggs, explains the researcher. But she warns: “It is not possible to recreate a 100% identical copy of something that has disappeared. In fact, animals are the product of their genome and their environment, and the latter has changed dramatically since the 1600s.
It is cheaper to prevent species from disappearing
Still, the prospect of resuscitating extinct species is not unanimous in the scientific community. Several researchers interviewed by the Associated Press expressed skepticism about this possible “de-extinction”. “Preventing species from becoming extinct should be our priority. And in most cases it’s a lot cheaper,” notes Boris Worm, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
“There’s a real danger in saying that if we destroy nature, we can just put it back – because we can’t,” insists Stuart Pimm of Duke University in North Carolina ( UNITED STATES). And the latter to raise a much more prosaic question: “Where the hell would you put a woolly mammoth, other than in a cage?” The ecosystems where mammoths lived are long gone. Like that of the dodos. For its project, Colossal intends to partner with the authorities of Mauritius, which have succeeded in reintroducing the giant Aldabra tortoise on the small islands.
