Colossal started with a splashy announcement about a plan to do something many scientists thought was impossible with current technology. All to create a product with no clear market potential: the woolly mammoth. Since then, the company has settled on a potentially viable business model, setting its sights on a species whose biology is far more favorable: thylacine, a marsupial predator that went extinct in the early 1900s.
Today, the company announced its third de-extinction goal and its return to the thorny realm of reproductive biology. This requires the project to clear many technical hurdles. I hope to revive the dodo.
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The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall) flightless bird that evolved on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Once European sailors arrived on the island, it quickly became a food source for them and the invasive species that accompanied them, and he became extinct within a century after the first descriptions reached Europe.
Lack of fear of humans at first turned into a metaphor for stupidity. However, as concerns about human-caused extinctions and ecological disruptions grew, the metaphor shifted to the dodo representing a preventable tragedy caused by human thoughtlessness. For Colossal, it’s the latter trope that made its de-extinction so appealing. “I think a lot of it comes down to name recognition,” said Beth Shapiro, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who is collaborating with Colossal. I don’t think they care much about extinction, but somehow the dodo has this real fascination with people.
Shapiro told Ars, “I think by targeting something that’s very famous — something that’s a symbol of human-caused extinction — it gets more people thinking about it.” , which is also collaborating with another project looking to avoid extinction of the passenger pigeon, the second of these icons.)
In the case of thylacines and mammoths, Colossal argued that returning these keystone species to their formerly inhabited habitats would drastically change the habitats and which species could survive and thrive there. The company’s claims about restoring the Dodo are in many ways the opposite. For the revived dodo to survive there, the ecosystem must be restored.
“If [dodos] In order to be able to re-establish a thriving population in Mauritius, many of the alien species introduced there need to be removed. , helps revive,” Shapiro said. It may be that they are trying to survive because of an invasive species rather than because the dodo is gone. “
