We might see the Dodo soon, after the dire wolf come-back. And that too within a decade. The company Colossal Biosciences has the Dodo as 2nd or 3rd top priority. Here’s how they intend to do it.
In case you are wondering, the Dodo comes from Mauritius, where i live.
Mauritian authorities expressed much enthusiasm at the thought of generating revenue through eco-tourism says Beth Shapiro, a noted ancient-DNA researcher who is now the chief science officer at Colossal, says, reminding the time when she visited Mauritius.
The person in charge of the Dodo project at Colossal, Anna Keyte, led a team at U.C. Santa Cruz that sequenced the Dodo genome. Interest in the Dodo has been around since sometimes it seems.
People got crazy over dire wolves as they are icons of the Game of Throne series, loved by many people. When people heard they were coming back, it made big headlines.
But, the science is based on deception. How the thing works is that it imitates dire wolves.
Elinor Karlsson, a program director at a joint Harvard and M.I.T. facility and an expert on wolf and dog genetics, asked Beth: “Why are you calling this a dire wolf when it’s a gray wolf with seventeen or eighteen changes in its DNA?”.
Beth responded: “We’ve succeeded in creating the phenotype of a dire wolf.” A phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of the it’s genetic constitution with the environment. In programming we say if it quacks like a duck it’s a duck, not true at all in this particular context.
Bringing back the Dodo is as deceptive. Keyte, the Dodo program director, has been looking at the ten thousand genetic differences between the Dodo and it’s extant relatives to identify which gene is responsible for what characteristic. They also looked at the Solitaire, from Rodrigues now extinct and found that both are relatives of the pigeon.
They assume that pigeons came to Mauritius and Rodrigues and became larger and decided that they no longer needed to fly based on a flight-related gene that had become inactive in these two.
So, they are thinking of disactivating a flight-gene in the Nicobar pigeon to recreate the Dodo. Resurrecting the Dodo is thus pure sensationalism and is deceptive labelling at best.
I took the materials from “The Dire Wolf Is Back, The New Yorker”
Below is one of the best representations of the Dodo from Ustad Mansur, an Indian Painter who lived during the time of Jahangir. He actually saw the Dodo and is one of the best representations. Current paintings base themselves on it. Even the color is believed to be very accurate.