De-Extinction Daily

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We are close to resurrecting the DoDo bird

Reuters, 10-14, 26, Company previously genetically engineered the dire wolf, https://www.reuters.com/science/us-company-announces-progress-toward-resurrecting-extinct-dodo-2026-10-14/

Oct 14 (Reuters) - A US biotech company says it is making progress toward its goal of resurrecting the dodo, the famous flightless bird with a large hooked beak, and returning it to its native Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where humans drove it to extinction in the 17th century.

Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday it has used a newly developed AI platform to identify ‌genetic changes that may be responsible for the dodo's distinctive craniofacial traits as its scientists pursue gene-editing targets to bring back this lost species.

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Colossal is planning to perform gene-editing to bring dodo traits into the cells of its closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon. Native to some Southeast Asian islands, the Nicobar pigeon is known for its shimmering green and copper feathers and, unlike the dodo, can fly.

The company said it is in the final stages of its analysis of the dodo genome, now filled to 95%. It also said it has made an advance that should shorten the time needed to test whether a genetic edit produces the desired trait. The company did not announce a timeframe for hatching a dodo.

Colossal says it is dedicated to "de-extinction" — resurrecting ⁠vanished species. Last year, it said it had genetically engineered the dire wolf by editing the genes of the gray wolf, the extinct Ice Age predator's closest living relative, to add dire wolf traits.

Besides the dodo and dire wolf, Colossal has four other species on its de-extinction list: the woolly mammoth; the thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger; the bluebuck antelope; and the moa, a large flightless bird.

"The dodo is the world's best-known symbol of extinction caused by people. It disappeared within decades of humans arriving on Mauritius, largely because of the introduction of invasive species like rats and other animals they brought. Bringing it back shows extinction doesn't have to be permanent," Ben Lamm, Colossal's CEO and co-founder, told Reuters.

"The big hurdles ahead are proving which genetic changes really matter, making many of those edits in a bird and passing them to the next generation, and preparing a safe home for dodos on Mauritius," Lamm said.

The dodo was a ground-nesting bird about 3 feet (1 metre) tall and weighing up to about 50 pounds (23 kg). Having never encountered humans, dodos exhibited no fear of the people who reached Mauritius in the 16th century. Pressured by invasive species and human hunting, the last living dodo was seen in 1662. It ‌has remained ⁠alive in popular culture including in Lewis Carroll's book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

So in the context of AI where we're saturating limits of what CPUs and GPUs can do, quantum, that subatomic scale, offers us a path to

GENOMORPH PLATFORM

Ancient DNA is always broken into small pieces, so no ancient genome is perfectly complete, including that of the dodo.

The new AI platform Colossal built is called GenoMorph.

"The challenge was scientists only have one complete dodo genome, making it difficult to distinguish the genetic differences that made the dodo unique from ordinary genetic variation. GenoMorph effectively acts as a 'treasure map' for the dodo genome, narrowing hundreds of thousands of possible genetic changes into the targets most likely to explain its iconic beak and facial structure," Lamm said.

Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief science officer, said GenoMorph finds likely gene-editing targets for species with very ⁠little surviving DNA. Normally scientists compare many genomes from one species to find the genes behind a trait, but this is not possible with the dodo, Shapiro said.

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"So instead, GenoMorph studies how skulls and beaks develop across more than 70 living bird species and learns which genetic switches control their shape. It gave us a shortlist of about 2,300 candidates linked to beak size and shape. These targets are now being validated in the lab," Shapiro ⁠said.

Colossal said it has expanded its colony of Nicobar pigeons in Texas to 36 birds following successful breeding among established pairs. It said this should help in studying Nicobar pigeon development, reproduction and genetics.

Lamm said the company is working with Mauritian scientists, conservation groups and the Mauritius government on what bringing the dodo back to its native land might look like.

"Getting Mauritius ready for dodos also means removing invasive ⁠predators and restoring habitat, which helps the native species living there now," Lamm said. "No release sites will be chosen until the ecological work and community consultation are finalized, but it is Colossal's goal to put our dodos back into their natural habitats in Mauritius."

We already have some level of de-extinction

Quereshi, March 12, 2026, Sadiah Qureshiis a writer and historian of science, race, and empire. Currently a Chair of Modern British History at the University of Manchester, she is the author of Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (2025), and has written for The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and New Statesman magazine, AEON, Reversing extinction, https://aeon.co/essays/de-extinction-is-redefining-what-it-means-to-be-alive

In 2003, a unique baby goat lived and died. In doing so, she might be regarded as the first species to have endured the indignity of going extinct twice.

The Pyrenean ibex, also known as the bucardo, was once native to the mountainous regions of Spain. By the mid-20th century, hunting had severely depleted populations. By 1999, only one survived, named Celia. When she died a year later, the bucardo was declared extinct.

While she was alive, tissue samples from Celia’s ear were collected, and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Encouraged by previously successful techniques for cloning animals, a team of Spanish, French and Belgian scientists hoped to bring back the bucardo. They cultured the harvested cells to isolate bucardo DNA, and transferred cloned genomes to domestic goat eggs with the nuclei removed. A total of 208 embryos were transferred to surrogate mothers: either Spanish ibex (a still-living, related species) or hybrids of Spanish ibex and domestic goats. Seven pregnancies resulted, but only one goat carried to full term. That goat gave birth to a bucardo kid by caesarean section.

The tiny Pyrenean ibex was genetically identical to the last living bucardo, making her a direct clone. But while the kid appeared healthy until birth, she never took a breath. The desperate team tried to help her breathe, but she was declared dead within a few minutes. An autopsy on her miniature body identified a defective lung.

The story of the cloned bucardo kid can be told in many ways. Was this a rare double-extinction? Perhaps. More cautiously, we might suggest that the experiment was never a successful de-extinction at all, because the kid was never able to perform the same ecological function as the lost species. But there is also a more provocative telling: that neither happened, because the bucardo never went extinct in the first place.

In recent years, some advocates of de-extinction technologies have argued that if an animal’s tissues and cultured cells persist in a state of cryopreservation, it is not extinct, but ‘evolutionarily torpid’. In other words, the death of the last living animal is not an ending, merely a pause.

This reframing isn’t merely semantic – it reshapes the meaning of conservation. If frozen cells forestall extinction, when do we declare a species lost? And if genetic material assuages our guilt that a ‘way of being’ survives, why invest in protecting living animals? The question cuts deeper: what distinguishes being alive from existing as dormant genetic material?

Beyond recent heated debates about whether de-extinction is possible or wise lies a more fundamental shift: these technologies are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself.

Definition of “extinction”

Declaring a species extinct is not just a technical decision, but a notoriously difficult process, especially with wild lives. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declares a species officially extinct ‘when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died’.

De-extinction includes building radically different futures

Occasionally, the death of celebrity ‘endlings’ means we know when species were lost. Perhaps the most famous is Martha, the last known passenger pigeon. She died on 1 September 1914 at Cincinnati Zoo. She was quickly skinned, stuffed, and displayed mounted on a thin branch. She now resides in the stores of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Some living endlings are so precious that they are watched over round the clock by armed security guards, such as the last pair of northern white rhinos, Najin and her daughter Fatu, in Kenya. Their deaths will make global headlines and mark the extinction of their kind with rare precision. Mostly though, extinction is far more likely to occur without us noticing, or take us decades to confirm the loss.

Yet in recent years, some have suggested that no species is truly lost, so long as genetic material remains. Through de-extinction, they say, we can even revive creatures that no one alive has encountered: dinosaurs, dire wolves or dodos. Whenever de-extinction hits the headlines – as it has done often in recent years – the stories tend to focus on the past, whether reviving lost species or recreating ecosystems. Appealing to loss is a powerful marketing tool for companies trying to raise capital and convince us that de-extinction is a viable means of conservation. But de-extinction is also a process of deliberately building radically different futures, rather than mere revival. The future-oriented nature of de-extinction is rarely discussed, despite its potential to reshape fundamental aspects of how we relate to life and death in the natural world.

De-extinction includes

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