The dodo is one of the most famous extinct animals. But the bird may be getting a second chance at life. Colossal Bisociences is planning to resurrect the animal, and it just took a major leap forward.
The company confirmed they've successfully cultured pigeon primordial germ cells. This is an early step needed in order to resurrect the bird from beyond the grave. It's a major step forward for the process. Speaking with People, co-founder Ben Lamm and chief science officer, Dr. Beth Shapiro discussed the progress.
"Only three bird species have ever had [PGC culture conditions], and now pigeons," explained Lamm. "It's very, very hard to do, and we did this in 18 months, so this was a very, very big step. This was a huge technology unlock for the dodo," Lamm says of culturing pigeon PGCs.
Dodo Will Return
"We couldn't tell people [if] dodos are going to take 20 years to bring back or 30 years to bring back until we got to this PGC," says Lamm. "Now that we've got to PGCs, we are confident that in the next five to seven years we can see a dodo, but hopefully that'll go even faster once we get into the editing."
This comes after the company resurrected the dire wolf, making headlines. "They're behaving more and more like wolves, less like animals raised by humans," Lamm says.
"Colossal is a de-extinction company, but we're a species preservation company," says Shapiro. "We are interested in developing technologies that we can use to make entire ecosystems more resilient to whatever it is that people or nature are going to throw at those ecosystems today and into the future. And one of the ways to do that is to restore species that used to be there."
It's an exciting time for the company.
"What we're doing is complicated — sometimes exciting, sometimes scary," he shares. "The only way to make science cool again, like NASA was for me as a kid, is to have all the hard conversations and bring people along for the ride."
