Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and CB (i.e. Colossal Biosciences, if someone is confused), is intent on making it worse, apparently.
With the grey/dire wolves, they actually have
something: three grey wolf puppies (Arctic wolf subspecies, most likely), with
some biological & anatomical modifications that are supposed to make them
more like the extinct dire wolves. Lately, the news of those three are rare,
hopefully, then, they have not died on CB’s watch.
With the moa birds, CB ignored the fact that we
still have samples of the moa birds’ skins, feathers, and the like, and
proclaimed that they will hybridize the Australian emu with the South American
tinamous, and release the new hybrids into the New Zealand wilds. This movie is
of a dubious legality, but the fact that there is no guarantee that the
resulting hybrid ratites will be viable supersedes that. Therefore, lately, the
commotion around the would-be revived moa birds is dying down, and CB’s
celebrity sponsors, such as Sir Peter Jackson, (who made the ‘Hobbit’ and LotR
movie trilogies), are keeping quiet.
Now, (September 2025), CB is launching yet another
proclamation: they recovered some sort of primeval pigeon gene that will allow
them to recreate the dodo. CB just needs chicken eggs. Pause.
The dodo were pigeons. They were very specialized
pigeons, they had their own subtribe, and their closest relative was the
solitaire, another specialized flightless species that died in the 17th
century as well. Their closest living
relatives belong to the pigeon tribe Raphini, whose members are relatively big
and bulky, especially for flying birds.
…The Columbidae birds (pigeons, doves, etc.) come in
two main varieties: sleek and streamlined, or big and bulky. The dodo and the
solitaire were two extremes of the second variety, but their living relatives,
such as the Nicobar pigeon and the crowned pigeons, also tend to be heavyset,
though nowhere as extreme as their extinct kin was. Where do the chickens
enter?
Nowhere, that is the thing. Chickens are gamebirds,
members of the Galliformes order, completely separate from the aforementioned pigeons,
doves and co.; the chicken and the pigeon may look superficially similar to
each other, but they are just as closely related as the red fox and the
hedgehog – i.e. not at all aside from the most basic ties. To use chicken eggs
(and genes?) to bring back the dodo is about as logical as using elephants to
bring back the Smilodon.
As for the primeval pigeon genes/genomes/etc. …The
name alone is rather unfortunate and populistic – and also vague and
generalized. CB gives no concrete guarantee that using this technique will
bring back the dodo precisely and not something else entirely. A creation of a
brand-new pigeon species, flightless or not, would be exciting, but it would
not be re-wilding, not really. Rather, it would be playing God with life (with
birds, to be more specific), and that is something else. Of course, whether CB
would go this course, and not just take the sponsors’ money and run, is another
question…
So, to recap: in a matter of years, in less than a
decade, CB went from something respectable to half-frauds and half-madmen, who
have done science in general, and rewilding in particular, a bad service
indeed. To make matters even worse for them, there is no real source of dodo
DNA – a head and a leg is all that remained of a rather enchanting RL species;
pity that it could not co-exist with humans and their companions, (such as
domestic pigs turned feral, and rats). CB – or anyone else – just would not be
able to acquire dodo genes at all, and what they are offering instead may just
suffer from a bad, populist name, or perhaps CB is just pulling a completely
banal, ordinary, con. The future will show. Real life seriously sucks,
sometimes.
This is it for now – see you all soon!
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