The dodo is dead. That’s kind of its claim to fame. Had a bit of an awkward-looking beak. Couldn’t fly. Poor relation to the pigeon. Generally mediocre all around, really. But it did manage to waddle its way into the history books due to an unfortunate extinction event.
Like a rather clumsy phoenix, however, the dodo may rise again. In 2023, Colossal Biosciences, a gene-editing company that had already made headlines for its plans to revive the woolly mammoth, announced it was trying to bring the dodo “back to life”. At the time, Beth Shapiro, the lead palaeogeneticist at the Texas-based startup, told the Guardian that she had been fascinated by the dodo ever since she saw a preserved specimen in an Oxford museum in 1999, and tried to persuade the museum to let her extract its DNA. Which was certainly enterprising of her.
While there are obviously significant challenges to reviving extinct animals, getting celebrities to cough up millions of dollars to fund these efforts isn’t one of them. Last week, the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his partner, the producer Fran Walsh, became the latest high-flyers to invest millions (in this case a cool $10m) in Colossal Biosciences.
On the surface, this may seem like a colossal waste of money. But there may be a method to this madness: one genetics expert told Bloomberg that generating hype – and resources – through plans to revive extinct animals may help Colossal solve more pressing conservation problems in the short-term.
Still, I remain sceptical. “The dodo is a symbol of man-made extinction,” the co-founder of Colossal Ben Lamm told AP last year. Right. And if this revival attempt goes anything like Jurassic Park, the resurrected dodo may well become a symbol of man’s hubris. Sometimes you’ve just got to let sleeping dodos lie.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
