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Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering startup known for its bold mission to resurrect extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, announced on Tuesday that it’s going to try to “de-extinct” another long-gone species: the dodo. The company has brought on evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro to help lead the project. “The dodo is a prime example of a species that became extinct because we—people—made it impossible for them to survive in their native habitat,” Shapiro said in a statement. The flightless bird went extinct in 1681 due to deforestation, overhunting, and the introduction of new species like pigs and macaques by humans on its native island of Mauritius. Much like in Jurassic Park,however, Colossal’s de-extinction efforts won’t result in an exact genetic copy of the original dodo but rather a species with edited DNA to be approximately like the bird. Let’s hope it goes a lot smoother than in the movie.
