How the dodo might return with the Nicobar pigeon as its surrogate mother

A 'de-extinction' firm plans to also bring back the Tasmanian wolf and woolly mammoth

The dodo, the Tasmanian wolf and the woolly mammoth: Three extinct species from three widely separated geographies, and different eras. The dodo was last recorded as seen in Mauritius around 1662. The last mammoths probably died around 4,000 years ago. The Tasmanian wolf went extinct as recently as the 1930s.  

All three species could perhaps live again, albeit in a hybrid version, if an American genome research start-up has its way. Colossal Biosciences, which is based in Dallas (Texas), was founded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm along with pioneering Harvard geneticist George Church, and it includes other eminent scientists like Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This unicorn has raised money from a rainbow cloud of investors. There are mainstream VCs like Breyer Capital, Draper Associates, Animal Capital, At One Ventures, Jazz Ventures, Bold Capital, Global Space Ventures, Climate Capital, Winklevoss Capital, etc. There are also bitcoin millionaires in the game, and movie moguls like Thomas Tull, who funded production of Dune and Jurassic World.

Colossal intends to sequence the genome of these three very different species, and compare those genomes to the closest related living species, to find the unique bits. Scientists will then look for a way to stitch the unique bits of DNA from the extinct animals into embryos derived from their nearest relatives. If that experiment works, we will have a hybrid bird, and two hybrid animals, looking like and sharing the characteristics of the long-dead species their DNA was sequenced from.

The first target for Colossal was the mammoth. There is mammoth DNA available from specimens frozen into Siberian and Arctic permafrost, which is now melting under the impact of global warming. (Million-year-old mammoth DNA has been sequenced.)

The Thylacine, aka the Tasmanian wolf (also called the Tasmanian tiger because it was a doglike animal with tiger stripes), was the next target.

Colossal also launched an Avian Genomics Group and with a reported $150 million of additional investment, it’s targeting the flightless dodo.

In late January, Shapiro’s team claimed that it had managed to sequence the entire genome of the extinct bird, working from a tiny amount of mitochondrial DNA, which the team had managed to salvage. It has also discovered the dodo’s closest living relative was the Nicobar pigeon.

Although the dodo was the third species to be targeted, it could actually be the first to be recreated. This is because the other two species have much longer gestation periods than the bird, which has a reproductive cycle of just about a month.

The idea is to edit the DNA of the Nicobar pigeon and use techniques like CRISPR (which allows the cutting and pasting of DNA sequences) to stitch the DNA of the two species together and place the amalgam in an unfertilised egg. The artificially fertilised egg would then be placed inside a Nicobar pigeon, which would be the surrogate mother. Hopefully, it would give birth to a hybrid that is close to the dodo.  

Dodos and Nicobar pigeons are very different in physical appearance and ability, though they have a close genetic match.

Dodos (Portuguese for “stupid” because they had no sense of danger) were flightless birds that stood about one-metre-tall and weighed between 15 and 20 kg. Essentially they went extinct because hungry sailors ate them. Nicobar pigeons are much smaller and lighter, though they are large as pigeons go at around 42 cm in length.

This difference is not surprising – homo sapiens and gorillas share 98.8 per cent of DNA, for example, but have significant differences in size, appearance and abilities. The mammoth’s closest relative is the Asian elephant, which shares 99.6 per cent of DNA. But the mammoth is much larger, much more hairy, with huge tusks and far more fat.  

All this is fine in theory, but it’s an open question whether this technique of splicing DNA to create a hybrid resembling an extinct creature will work.

The advantage with the dodo is that it can be done multiple times with multiple surrogates in a short time. If it works, the company plans to work with the Mauritius government to release flocks of the bird back into the wild.

There are similar long-term plans of reseeding habitats with mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. In both these cases, too, humans were at least partially, or maybe even fully responsible for driving the species in question to extinction. In all three cases, the local ecosystem suffered great loss and change as a key species disappeared. If the species is reintroduced, it could be good for the environment and the ecosystem.  

Recreating an extinct species, or three very different ones for that matter, is not just about “cool” scientific experiments. It could result in huge advances in technical knowledge that might work with more species. Given enormous species loss in the 20th and 21st centuries and with more losses expected, managing to save some species at risk, or to resurrect some lost species, could be one way to help restabilise the global ecosystem.

Hybrid rebirth

• Dodo last recorded as seen in Mauritius around 1662
• Dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon
• Idea is to edit the pigeon’s DNA and stitch together the DNAs of the two species and place in unfertilised egg
• Artificially fertilised egg would then be placed inside a Nicobar pigeon
• Dodo has a reproductive cycle of just about a month
• If successful, this can be done multiple times with multiple surrogates in a short time