Deextinction

An artist’s imagining of the dodo bird, which went extinct in the 17th century.Illustration: Colossal BiosciencesGenetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it’s received $150 million in new funding to support its “de-extinction” activities.The dodo was already part of Colossal’s plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150…

Not content with aiming to resurrect the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, Colossal Biosciences has now announced the third animal on its de-extinction list – the dodo. This comes on the heels of a substantial new round of funding, with the company also providing an update on its scientific progress so far.The dodo was first discovered in 1598 by Dutch explorers on the then-uninhabited island of Mauritius – and less than a century later it was extinct. The deadly combination of human hunting and introduced animals like…

Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate. Founded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church, the company first said it would re-create the mammoth. And a year later it announced such an effort for the thylacine, aka the Tasmanian tiger. Now, with the launch of a…

Even if Colossal can make what it terms “a functional proxy for the dodo,” there won’t be a clear answer about where to put it. The big agricultural industry in Mauritius is sugar cane farming, and there are plenty of rats and other non-native predators around. “It would not really be a dodo, it would be a new species. But it still needs an environment,” says Jennifer Li Pook Than, a gene sequencing specialist at Stanford University whose parents were born on the island. “What would that mean ethically, if one is not…

The last known thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus, or Tasmanian tiger) died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. Now, a genetic engineering company that last year announced plans to put thousands of woolly mammoths back on the Siberian steppe has added the lost marsupial wolf to its de-extinction docket.The company’s name is Colossal, and its declared aim is to bring back species wiped off the face of the planet by things like climate change (the mammoths) and humankind (the thylacine). These days, those two threats go…

Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that we have photographs and film clips of the last thylacines ending their days in zoos. Late enough that in just a few decades, countries would start writing laws to prevent other species from seeing the…

Last year, genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences unveiled its grand plans to resurrect the woolly mammoth, and now the team has revealed the second species on its de-extinction list – Australia’s lost thylacine. Partnering with a University of Melbourne lab, the project could revive the creature in about a decade.The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is a carnivorous marsupial that was once common across the Australian mainland, before competition with the dingo led to a sharp decline. A smaller population…

The thylacine has long been an icon of human-caused extinction. In the 1800s and early 1900s, European colonizers in Tasmania wrongly blamed the dog-sized, tiger-striped, carnivorous marsupial for killing their sheep and chickens. The settlers slaughtered thylacines by the thousands, exchanging the animals’ scalps for a government bounty. The last known thylacine spent its days pacing a zoo cage in Hobart, Tasmania, and died of neglect in 1936. Now the wolflike creature—also known as the Tasmanian tiger—is poised to…