If there’s one thing you know about the dodo, it’s that it is extinct. Well, one company is trying to make the dodo’s extinction go the way of the dodo.
Colossal Biosciences has announced “huge breakthroughs” in its efforts to bring the flightless bird back to life.
As the company explains, cloning a bird is not currently possible, so making new dodos requires “unlocking the genetic edits that transform a Nicobar pigeon into a dodo” and then “turning those edits inside a single cell into a living bird.”
“To bring back the dodo, we need to edit pigeon PGCs, special stem cells that become sperm and eggs,” Colossal says. “Until now, they’d only been cultured for chickens and gees.”
“We just changed all that,” the company continues. “The world’s first pigeon PGC culture is complete.”
If this sounds a bit familiar, you may remember Colossal as the company that previously claimed it’d brought the dire wolf back from extinction.