The term “dead as a dodo” may no longer ring true, thanks to Colossal Biosciences, which announced on January 31 that it is planning to “de-extinct” the dodo.
It’s the third extinct species that the U.S. company has announced that it is bringing back from the dead, the others being the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine.
However, many scientists don’t think that bringing back species like the dodo is a good move.
“Bringing dodos back does not help the species (I’m not sure that idea makes any sense). Nor does it help the actual dodos who were victims of human activities,” Josh Milburn, a moral and political philosophy lecturer at Loughborough University, told Newsweek. “It just creates new dodos. Does it help us? Creating animals just for our own curiosity does not sound respectful; it sounds like we’re instrumentalising these animals.
The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, measuring around 3 feet and 3 inches tall. It had very few predators, so was fearless when humans arrived on the island in the 1500s. Unfortunately, it was killed en masse by sailors for food, and populations were additionally decimated by invasive species brought over by the European ships, including dogs, pigs, cats, and rats.
The dodo is thought to have gone extinct some time between 1688–1715, with sightings having dropped massively even by the 1660s. The bird had only been described for the first time in 1598 by Dutch travelers during the second Dutch expedition to Indonesia, a mere century before.
The dodo de-extinction project is only now possible due to the dodo genome having been sequenced for the first time by a team at the University of California in 2022.
#dadobirds #sciencemodernera #extinctanimals
source