Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said [January 31] that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it’s received $150 million in new funding to support its “de-extinction” activities.
Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal’s total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company’s first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial.
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De-extinction is something of a misnomer, as this process, if successful, will yield science’s best analogue for an extinct creature, not the creature itself as it existed in the past. De-extinction methods generally rely on using a living creature’s genetics in the resurrection process. That means any 21st-century mammoth will have at least some modern elephant DNA imbued in it, and any nascent thylacine would be produced from the genome and egg of a related species.
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Similarly, it will be difficult to know whether a proxy thylacine, dodo, or mammoth is behaving as a bonafide version of the animal may have behaved. Lots of animal behavior is taught from parents, but a resurrected mammoth would be alone in the world.
