Texas entrepreneur tries to revive the dodo
Texas entrepreneur working to bring back the woolly mammoth has added a new species to his revival list: the dodo.
Recreating this flightless bird, a symbol of human-caused extinction, is a chance for redemption. It might also motivate humans to remove invasive species from Mauritius, the bird's native habitat, said Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences.
“Humanity can undo the sins of the past with these advancing genetic rescue technologies,” Lamm said. “There is always a benefit for carefully planned rewilding of a species back into its native environment.”
The dodo is the third animal that Colossal Biosciences — which announced Jan. 31 it has raised $225 million since September 2021 — is working to recreate.
And no, the company isn't cloning extinct animals — that's impossible, said Lamm, who lives in Dallas. Instead, it's focusing on genes that produce the physical attributes of the extinct animals. The animals it's creating will have core genes from those ancestors, engineered for the same niche the extinct species inhabited.
The woolly mammoth, for instance, is being called an Arctic elephant. It will look like a woolly mammoth and contribute to the Arctic ecosystem in a way that's similar to the woolly mammoth. But it will technically be an Asian elephant with genes altered to survive in the cold. Asian elephants and woolly mammoths share 99.6 percent of their DNA.
The mammoth was the company's first project because it had long been a passion for Harvard University geneticist and Colossal co-founder George Church. He believes that Arctic elephants are the key to creating an Ice Agelike ecosystem with grasslands and grazing mammals, and this could help fight climate change by sequestering carbon under permanently frozen grounds that span areas including Siberia, Canada, Greenland and Alaska.
The altered genes could also give elephants a new habitat that's far away from the destructive forces of (most) humans, and the company's gene editing technologies could help eradicate elephant diseases.
The company's de-extinction projects seek to fill ecological voids and restore ecosystems, Lamm said. The Tasmanian tiger, which Colossal announced as its second deThe extinction animal in August of 2022, is a good example. This tiger was the only apex predator in the Tasmanian ecosystem. No other animal filled its place when it went extinct.
Apex predators eat sick and weak animals, which helps control the spread of disease and improves an ecosystem's genetic health. So the tiger's extinction could have contributed to the near-extinction of Tasmanian devils that lived in the same ecosystem, Lamm said.
For the dodo, Colossal is partnering with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, a scientific advisory board member for Colossal who led the team that first fully sequenced the dodo's genome.
The dodo went extinct in 1662 as a direct result of human settlement and ecosystem competition. They were killed off by hunting and the introduction of invasive species. Creating an environment where the dodos can thrive will require humans to remove the invaders (the non-human invaders, anyway), and this environmental restoration could have cascading benefits on other plants and animals.
“Everybody has heard of the dodo, and everybody understands that the dodo is gone because people changed its habitat in such a way that it could not survive,” Shapiro said. “By taking on this audacious project, Colossal will remind people not only of the tremendous consequences that our actions can have on other species and ecosystems, but also that it is in our control to do something about it.”
The company has secured $150 million in funding to revive this bird and build an Avian Genomics Group, bringing the company's total fundraising to $225 million.
Colossal has more than 40 scientists and three laboratories working to recreate the woolly mammoth, and they hope to have mammoth calves in 2028. There are 30 scientists working on the Tasmanian tiger.
Reviving extinct animals is not a quick process, especially when considering the development of new technologies and the natural processes of Mother Nature (elephant gestation takes 22 months!). Some of Colossal's projects will take nearly a decade to complete, which is why the company is working to reintroduce multiple animals at the same time.
“Given the rapidly changing planet and various ecosystems heavily influenced by humankind, we need more tools in our tool belt to also help species adapt faster than they are currently evolving,” Lamm said.
And the tools aren't limited to extinct animals. Colossal is developing technology that can benefit other industries, and it's spinning these out into new companies. Last year, it spun out a software platform called Form Bio that's designed to help scientists collaborate and work with their data, visualizing it in meaningful ways rather than looking at raw numbers in a spreadsheet.
“Synthetic biology will allow the world to solve various human-induced, world-wide problems,” Lamm said, “like making drought-resistant livestock, curing certain disease states in humans, creating corals that are tolerant to various salinities and higher temperatures ... and much more.”