The phrase “dead as a dodo” could one day no longer apply.
More than 300 years after the flightless bird became extinct, scientists at the University of California Santa Cruz have sequenced its full genome, raising the possibility that it could be brought back to life.
Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, told a Royal Society of Medicine webinar that her group would soon publish the complete DNA sequence of the bird after finding a “fantastic specimen” in a Danish museum.
Dodos evolved on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius and were first spotted by Portuguese sailors in 1507. The flightless, large-beaked birds reached a weight of up to 20kg and in some cases stood as high as a metre.
With no natural predators, their extinction, towards the end of the 17th century, has been blamed on humans settling on the island and eating the birds, as well as harvesting the fruit they would normally consume. Dodos also became easy prey for the dogs, cats and pigs brought over by sailors.
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We might have to wait a while to see living dodos, however. Speaking at the webinar, Shapiro said: “If I have a cell and it’s living in a dish in the lab and I edit it so that it has a bit of dodo DNA, how do I then transform that cell into a whole, living, breathing actual animal?
“The way we can do this is to clone it, the same approach that was used to create Dolly the sheep — but we don’t know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways.
“So there needs to be another approach ... I have little doubt that we are going to get there, but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don’t have for mammals.”
