#Dodo bird extinct art how to

“But bringing back something that wasn’t so ancient would be much more feasible. “If you bring T-Rex back to life maybe that wouldn't be the popular thing as it would run riot and cause havoc. “The dodo is a popular bird and it’s one you can make a case for bringing back,” he said. However, he said it may not completely resemble the extinct bird. Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Bristol, said it would be preferable to bring back a dodo, rather than an animal from further back in time, because it could survive in today’s environment. It is closely related genetically to the Nicobar pigeon, and it is likely scientists would edit pigeon DNA to include Dodo DNA if they wanted to bring back the species. The dodo takes its name from the Portuguese word for 'fool' after sailors mocked it for its apparent lack of fear of armed hunters. There are groups working on different approaches for doing that and I have little doubt that we are going to get there but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don’t have for mammals.” Dodo may not resemble the extinct bird “So there needs to be another approach for birds and this is one really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction.

#Dodo bird extinct art how to

“The way we can do this is to clone it, the same approach that was used to create Dolly the Sheep, but we don't know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways. “If I have a cell and it’s living in a dish in the lab and I edit it so that it has a bit of Dodo DNA, how do I then transform that cell into a whole living, breathing, actual animal? “So we have a very high quality, high coverage, dodo genome which will soon be published,” she added, but warned that it still could be tricky to bring back the bird. She said that the team had now found “fantastic specimen” in Denmark. We got a tiny little bit of DNA…but that particular sample didn’t have sufficiently well-preserved DNA.” “I tried for a long time to get DNA from a specimen that’s in Oxford. It’s not been published yet, but it does exist and we’re working on it right now.” Not only was it hunted by humans, it also became prey for the dogs, cats and pigs brought with the sailors as they explored the islands of the Indian Ocean.Īsked whether the dodo genome had been completely sequenced, Prof Shapiro said: “Yes, the dodo genome is entirely sequenced because we sequenced it.

The flightless 3ft-tall bird was wiped out in the 17th-century, just 100 years after it was discovered on the island of Mauritius. The entire genome of the dodo has been sequenced for the first time, raising hopes that the bird could be brought back from extinction.īeth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told a Royal Society webinar that her group would soon publish the complete DNA of a specimen in the Natural History Museum of Copenhagen.