Could We Resurrect the Dodo?

in hopes of finding a way to resurrect it. But let's step back a bit and get to know the dodo, an animal that continues to live quite a life in popular culture and our lexicon, even after its extinction more than three hundred years ago. They lived in the forests of Mauritius, what's now an island nation in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, but

was then an unsettled wilderness. We know that dodos were large, flightless birds, land bound cousins of the dove and pigeon, but a lot of the details about what they looked like and how they lived are based on centuries old European travel journals and artists accounts, plus what modern scientists have managed to piece together from their remains, we think that dodos grew to about two to three feet in height up to a meter, and weighed up to forty

pounds or around seventeen kilos. Their feathers probably varied from shades of brown and gray to white and black, and they had a large, hooked beat with an exaggerated bulb at the tip. Their wings were undersized and not developed for flight. Although they've long been portrayed as slow, heavy, unintelligent birds, their name has become a synonym for dim witted. A recent analyzes show that they were pretty proportionate to other birds, no more plump than your average well fed

pigeon or chicken. Those unkind portrayals dim from the fact that when Portuguese and Dutch explorers and colonizers arrived on Mauritius starting in fifteen ninety eight, the dodos were filling a very specific evolutionary niche. These birds had no natural predators, and they didn't fear humans. The curious birds would sometimes approach people and could be easily herded into pens or onto ships to be used as a food source or

a traveling curiosity. Their lack of flight, combined with other strange seeming actions such as eating small rocks, which scientists now believe aided in digestion, contributed to Dodo's reputation as stupid lazy birds. The poor things were labeled with the species name Ditis ineptus for years after the word inept but in reality, the existing bone specimens we have from them suggest their feet and claws were powerful along the lines of fast, active land birds that run and climb.

They likely hunted fish and feasted on seeds and fruit. They didn't need wings, so their bodies eventually poured those resources into other specialties. The dodo is the first animal that Europeans found and then found to have disappeared, the first case of extinction that European science observed. It was a convenient narrative that the birds weren't fit for survival, though in reality they were perfectly fit for the environment

they developed in. The Dodo went extinct because of one reason. Humans, the Portuguese and Dutch introduced dogs, rats, pigs, monkeys, cats, and other animals to Mauritius. These animals ate the bird's eggs, which were laid on the ground. Humans hunted the dodos for food, even though the meat reportedly wasn't very good, and took Dodoes abroad to be displayed in exhibits. In the course of about eighty years, the bird and its

eggs were hunted to extinction. Over the next century, Tales about the Dodo fell almost into legend until a wave of new scientific interest hit in the mid eighteen hundreds, leading to an intense public reported scrabble for bones in the eighteen sixties. This is also when Lewis Carroll published his mythologized depiction of a bumbling gentleman Dodo in his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But going was hard for

the would be dodo anatomists. The people who had originally encountered Dodos hadn't thought to preserve their eggshells or bones. For the most part, Many Dodo bones have since been discovered in the swamps of Mauritius, but the environment has a corrosive effect. Only two complete skeletons have been found, one in nineteen oh four and one in two thousand and seven, the bladder of which has been nicknamed Fred.

There's another specimen of particular interest, a skull from a bird that may have been exhibited when it was alive in a London shop in the sixteen thirties. It wound up in the Oxford Museum, and it's the only known Dodo specimen that still has soft tissue attached. Relatively well preserved finds like these raised the question could scientists raise the Dodo bird, though some experts contend it will never

be possible. A great debate is underway in science about whether it's ethical to bring an extinct species back to life. As Jeff Goldbloom's character famously put it in the original Jurassic Park film, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think if they should. And now we're not too worried about rampaging

herds of dodos. This should is more that okay. But some animals are driven to extinction by human action, but others simply can't survive in their habitat due to natural pressures or because of some major change in climate. Earth has gone through several mass extinctions, and bringing back these creatures could throw the world's ecosystems into chaos. There's the question of where these creatures would go, especially since many

extinct creatures have no natural predators except for humans. Would putting a saber to tiger in the Siberian tundra disrupt local food chain in addition to terrorizing the locals. The alternative is keeping recreated species in a Jurassic park like zoo or nature preserve, but is creating a limited life for these creatures itself an ethical All of this aside were also stuck on the could part of the equation too.

If we had viable DNA from a Dodo, we could hypothetically implant it into the egg cell of a related existing species, probably a type of pigeon, and grow a clone of the original Dodo DNA donor, assuming that we could get the egg to develop, hatch, and live. But we don't have viable DNA so far. The warm climate of Mauritius has proven unhelpful in preserving the DNA in Dodo's bones, and only relatively poor quality DNA has been

extracted from the Oxford Dodo. However, our researchers have been working on reconstructing the Dodo's genome, which is a complete DNA map of a living creature. There's a concept that we might be able to take a cell from probably a pigeon and use modern genetic engineering techniques to edit the cell's genome to match the dodos. Again, you'd then have to implant the genome into an egg cell, and it would have to develop from there, possibly with help

from a surrogate bird. Now, as of twenty twenty two, a team out of UC Santa Cruz reported that they have reconstructed the dodo's genome, but there are still lots of other problems to crack. Egg pun absolutely intended. Who are we kidding? Birds are harder to clone than mammals because their egg cells don't develop the same way. It would also first have too genetically engineer a pigeon large

enough to develop and lay a Doto egg. And even at the point that we managed all of that, this hypothetical Dodo chick wouldn't have any family to life to to learn how to act like a Dodo. At that point, could we really say that we'd resurrected them or just something that looks like them pretty much as close as we figure. It's a lot of expensive questions to answer, though, of course, solving problems in genetics has potentially much more far reaching results. If we could bring back a Dodo.

Could we help save existing species before they hit the point of extinction? Imagine a future We're going the way of the Dodo actually meant making triumphant return. Today's episode is based on the article could scientists resurrect the Dodo bird? On HowStuffWorks dot Com? Written by Jacob Silverman. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks

dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.