“It’s pretty clear to people like me that thylacine or mammoth de-extinction is more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science.” “De-extinction is a fairytale science,” Jeremy Austin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Liam Mannix last year. In the meantime, other researchers are skeptical that the company can accomplish what it has set out to do. They are still developing the genetic processes needed to do so, writes MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado. In this way, it might engineer an animal that fills an ecological role similar to the dodo’s, per Wired’s Matt Reynolds.īut the scientists are still a long way off from achieving such a breakthrough with the dodo-or even with the mammoth or thylacine. Now, Colossal claims it can bring back the large flightless bird by editing the genomes of its living relatives. Once, dodos were denizens of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, but human explorers and their introduced animals hunted them to extinction by the end of the 17th century. “It’s the poster child, in a sad way, for how human habitat alteration can drive species to extinction.” “I’ve always been fascinated with the dodo,” Beth Shapiro, the lead paleogeneticist at Colossal, tells Vice’s Becky Ferreira. On Tuesday, the company, called Colossal Biosciences, added a third animal to its de-extinction bucket list: the dodo bird. Over the past year and a half, a biotechnology company has made headlines with its ambitious plans to genetically recreate members of two extinct species-the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
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