Could We Resurrect the Dodo?

The dodo was the first animal that we watched go extinct due to human intervention -- could it be the first animal we bring back? Learn more about the dodo and de-extinction in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/dodo.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Volbebam. Here.
The Dodo, a bird that went extinct in the sixteen
hundreds and was then made famous in traveling exhibitions and
works of fiction, may be ready for a comeback. Our
researchers have been working on the de extinction of the

(00:23):
dodo for at least twenty years, digging into its DNA
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

(00:44):
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

(01:04):
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

(01:26):
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

(01:49):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
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.

(02:55):
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,

(03:16):
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,

(03:39):
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

(04:01):
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.

(04:22):
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

(04:43):
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

(05:06):
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

(05:27):
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

(05:51):
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

(06:15):
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

(06:36):
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

(07:01):
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

(07:22):
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

(07:43):
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,

(08:04):
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.

(08:24):
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

(08:48):
is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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