(Image credit: Andrew Howe/Getty Images)įor example, mammoths are also extinct, and scientists haven't found any living mammoth cells. Skeletons of the extinct birds suggest to scientists how dodos may have looked when they were alive. Instead, Shapiro said, you'd have to start with a closely related animal's genome and then tweak it to resemble that of a dodo. Egg cells then use that DNA as a blueprint to differentiate themselves into the many kinds of cells - skin, organs, blood and bones - the animal needs.īut no living cells from dodos exist, nor have they existed for hundreds of years. Adult cells contain all the DNA needed to develop into a living animal. Cloning, the process that created Dolly the sheep in 1996 and Elizabeth Ann the black-footed ferret in 2020, creates an identical genetic copy of an individual by transplanting DNA from a living adult cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. "When most people think about de-extinction, they're imagining cloning," Shapiro said. There are a number of reasons why dodos would be complicated to resurrect, Shapiro told Live Science: They're not good candidates for cloning, because there are very few sources of dodo DNA bird reproduction is really complicated and there isn't necessarily a habitat for them to go back to.
It's unlikely that we'll see a dodo walking the Earth again anytime soon, according to evolutionary molecular biologist Beth Shapiro, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In the Nature study, researchers used a statistical method to estimate the extinction of the dodo, pushing the date to as late as 1690. Some researchers, however, point to reports of dodos on Mauritius in the late 1680s, Live Science reported in 2013. Unlike the thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger ( Thylacinus cynocephalus), a species whose last known individual died in captivity in 1936, dodo populations dwindled far from human observation, roughly around 1662, according to a 2004 study published in the journal Nature. The dodo's official date of extinction isn't certain. Today, the dodo is officially listed as extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. If any of the precious eggs survived and hatched, the introduced animals likely outcompeted juvenile and adult dodos for a limited food supply, Hume wrote in 2006 in the journal Historical Biology.
But for the new arrivals on the island, those nutritious, easy meals were conveniently located within easy reach on the forest floor. Tragically for the dodos, each devoured egg represented a female dodo's only chance for reproduction that year. Rather, a host of introduced species - including rats, pigs, goats and monkeys - likely caught and ate dodos and their eggs, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. (Image credit: ZU_09/Getty Images)Īnd it wasn't just humans who consumed the dodos. Wildlife on Mauritius evolved to fill various ecological niches, but these isolated species were slow to respond to newly arrived threats from across the ocean, National Geographic reported.For example, dodos were said to have no fear of humans who landed on their island beaches, so the birds were easily caught and killed by hungry Dutch sailors.Īrtistic representations of dodos historically represented the birds as rotund, slow and clumsy, but recent research hints otherwise. Highly specialized to its environment, the flightless and slow-to-reproduce species was vulnerable to the sudden introduction of predators in its once-safe island home.įor millions of years before human explorers set foot on Mauritius, the island had no large, land-based predators. The dodo went extinct through a fatal combination of slow evolution and fast environmental changes, according to National Geographic. Later, deforestation removed much of the dodo's woodland habitat, researchers reported in 2009 in the journal Oryx. By then, previous visitors to the island had already introduced so many predators that dodos no longer roamed the beaches and mountains. Mauritius and its neighboring islands harbored no permanent human population before the Dutch East India Company established a settlement there in the 1600s, according to the Stanford University Department of Anthropology. Mauritius is located about 700 miles (1,100 km) from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Dodos lived on the subtropical volcanic island of Mauritius, now an independent state made up of several islands in the Indian Ocean.
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