WEBVTT - Could We Resurrect the Dodo? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:08.639 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Volbebam. Here. 0:00:10.680 --> 0:00:13.520 The Dodo, a bird that went extinct in the sixteen 0:00:13.640 --> 0:00:16.959 hundreds and was then made famous in traveling exhibitions and 0:00:17.000 --> 0:00:20.800 works of fiction, may be ready for a comeback. Our 0:00:20.840 --> 0:00:23.599 researchers have been working on the de extinction of the 0:00:23.640 --> 0:00:26.720 dodo for at least twenty years, digging into its DNA 0:00:26.880 --> 0:00:31.200 in hopes of finding a way to resurrect it. But 0:00:31.600 --> 0:00:34.200 let's step back a bit and get to know the dodo, 0:00:34.600 --> 0:00:37.080 an animal that continues to live quite a life in 0:00:37.159 --> 0:00:40.640 popular culture and our lexicon, even after its extinction more 0:00:40.640 --> 0:00:44.159 than three hundred years ago. They lived in the forests 0:00:44.200 --> 0:00:47.200 of Mauritius, what's now an island nation in the Indian 0:00:47.200 --> 0:00:50.000 Ocean east of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, but 0:00:50.240 --> 0:00:55.360 was then an unsettled wilderness. We know that dodos were large, 0:00:55.360 --> 0:00:58.920 flightless birds, land bound cousins of the dove and pigeon, 0:00:59.320 --> 0:01:01.640 but a lot of the details about what they looked 0:01:01.720 --> 0:01:04.720 like and how they lived are based on centuries old 0:01:04.760 --> 0:01:09.280 European travel journals and artists accounts, plus what modern scientists 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:13.759 have managed to piece together from their remains, we think 0:01:13.800 --> 0:01:15.880 that dodos grew to about two to three feet in 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:18.559 height up to a meter, and weighed up to forty 0:01:18.600 --> 0:01:23.199 pounds or around seventeen kilos. Their feathers probably varied from 0:01:23.240 --> 0:01:26.560 shades of brown and gray to white and black, and 0:01:26.640 --> 0:01:29.639 they had a large, hooked beat with an exaggerated bulb 0:01:29.640 --> 0:01:33.240 at the tip. Their wings were undersized and not developed 0:01:33.280 --> 0:01:38.600 for flight. Although they've long been portrayed as slow, heavy, 0:01:38.840 --> 0:01:42.600 unintelligent birds, their name has become a synonym for dim witted. 0:01:43.120 --> 0:01:46.000 A recent analyzes show that they were pretty proportionate to 0:01:46.040 --> 0:01:49.560 other birds, no more plump than your average well fed 0:01:49.560 --> 0:01:54.000 pigeon or chicken. Those unkind portrayals dim from the fact 0:01:54.080 --> 0:01:57.880 that when Portuguese and Dutch explorers and colonizers arrived on 0:01:57.920 --> 0:02:01.560 Mauritius starting in fifteen ninety eight, the dodos were filling 0:02:01.600 --> 0:02:07.640 a very specific evolutionary niche. These birds had no natural predators, 0:02:07.760 --> 0:02:11.800 and they didn't fear humans. The curious birds would sometimes 0:02:11.840 --> 0:02:15.000 approach people and could be easily herded into pens or 0:02:15.040 --> 0:02:17.440 onto ships to be used as a food source or 0:02:17.480 --> 0:02:22.040 a traveling curiosity. Their lack of flight, combined with other 0:02:22.280 --> 0:02:26.200 strange seeming actions such as eating small rocks, which scientists 0:02:26.240 --> 0:02:30.760 now believe aided in digestion, contributed to Dodo's reputation as 0:02:30.800 --> 0:02:34.200 stupid lazy birds. The poor things were labeled with the 0:02:34.240 --> 0:02:38.320 species name Ditis ineptus for years after the word inept 0:02:39.919 --> 0:02:43.359 but in reality, the existing bone specimens we have from 0:02:43.400 --> 0:02:47.120 them suggest their feet and claws were powerful along the 0:02:47.160 --> 0:02:50.720 lines of fast, active land birds that run and climb. 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:54.919 They likely hunted fish and feasted on seeds and fruit. 0:02:55.680 --> 0:02:58.639 They didn't need wings, so their bodies eventually poured those 0:02:58.680 --> 0:03:04.320 resources into other specialties. The dodo is the first animal 0:03:04.320 --> 0:03:08.239 that Europeans found and then found to have disappeared, the 0:03:08.280 --> 0:03:12.720 first case of extinction that European science observed. It was 0:03:12.760 --> 0:03:15.720 a convenient narrative that the birds weren't fit for survival, 0:03:16.360 --> 0:03:19.000 though in reality they were perfectly fit for the environment 0:03:19.040 --> 0:03:24.280 they developed in. The Dodo went extinct because of one reason. Humans, 0:03:24.919 --> 0:03:28.800 the Portuguese and Dutch introduced dogs, rats, pigs, monkeys, cats, 0:03:28.840 --> 0:03:32.600 and other animals to Mauritius. These animals ate the bird's eggs, 0:03:32.680 --> 0:03:35.840 which were laid on the ground. Humans hunted the dodos 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:38.640 for food, even though the meat reportedly wasn't very good, 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:42.800 and took Dodoes abroad to be displayed in exhibits. In 0:03:42.840 --> 0:03:45.280 the course of about eighty years, the bird and its 0:03:45.280 --> 0:03:51.120 eggs were hunted to extinction. Over the next century, Tales 0:03:51.120 --> 0:03:55.040 about the Dodo fell almost into legend until a wave 0:03:55.160 --> 0:03:58.160 of new scientific interest hit in the mid eighteen hundreds, 0:03:58.520 --> 0:04:01.880 leading to an intense public reported scrabble for bones in 0:04:01.880 --> 0:04:06.040 the eighteen sixties. This is also when Lewis Carroll published 0:04:06.040 --> 0:04:09.400 his mythologized depiction of a bumbling gentleman Dodo in his 0:04:09.440 --> 0:04:14.920 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But going was hard for 0:04:14.960 --> 0:04:18.919 the would be dodo anatomists. The people who had originally 0:04:19.000 --> 0:04:22.520 encountered Dodos hadn't thought to preserve their eggshells or bones. 0:04:22.520 --> 0:04:25.720 For the most part, Many Dodo bones have since been 0:04:25.720 --> 0:04:28.760 discovered in the swamps of Mauritius, but the environment has 0:04:28.800 --> 0:04:32.960 a corrosive effect. Only two complete skeletons have been found, 0:04:33.240 --> 0:04:35.719 one in nineteen oh four and one in two thousand 0:04:35.720 --> 0:04:38.680 and seven, the bladder of which has been nicknamed Fred. 0:04:40.320 --> 0:04:43.719 There's another specimen of particular interest, a skull from a 0:04:43.720 --> 0:04:45.800 bird that may have been exhibited when it was alive 0:04:45.920 --> 0:04:48.880 in a London shop in the sixteen thirties. It wound 0:04:48.960 --> 0:04:51.560 up in the Oxford Museum, and it's the only known 0:04:51.640 --> 0:04:57.440 Dodo specimen that still has soft tissue attached. Relatively well 0:04:57.480 --> 0:05:01.839 preserved finds like these raised the question could scientists raise 0:05:01.960 --> 0:05:06.440 the Dodo bird, though some experts contend it will never 0:05:06.480 --> 0:05:10.039 be possible. A great debate is underway in science about 0:05:10.040 --> 0:05:13.920 whether it's ethical to bring an extinct species back to life. 0:05:14.120 --> 0:05:17.040 As Jeff Goldbloom's character famously put it in the original 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:20.600 Jurassic Park film, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether 0:05:20.640 --> 0:05:22.640 or not they could they didn't stop to think if 0:05:22.680 --> 0:05:27.400 they should. And now we're not too worried about rampaging 0:05:27.480 --> 0:05:32.240 herds of dodos. This should is more that okay. But 0:05:32.360 --> 0:05:35.359 some animals are driven to extinction by human action, but 0:05:35.520 --> 0:05:38.799 others simply can't survive in their habitat due to natural 0:05:38.839 --> 0:05:43.200 pressures or because of some major change in climate. Earth 0:05:43.200 --> 0:05:46.360 has gone through several mass extinctions, and bringing back these 0:05:46.360 --> 0:05:51.120 creatures could throw the world's ecosystems into chaos. There's the 0:05:51.200 --> 0:05:54.400 question of where these creatures would go, especially since many 0:05:54.440 --> 0:05:58.960 extinct creatures have no natural predators except for humans. Would 0:05:59.000 --> 0:06:02.320 putting a saber to tiger in the Siberian tundra disrupt 0:06:02.440 --> 0:06:06.800 local food chain in addition to terrorizing the locals. The 0:06:06.880 --> 0:06:10.919 alternative is keeping recreated species in a Jurassic park like 0:06:11.040 --> 0:06:15.599 zoo or nature preserve, but is creating a limited life 0:06:15.600 --> 0:06:21.200 for these creatures itself an ethical All of this aside 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:24.640 were also stuck on the could part of the equation too. 0:06:26.000 --> 0:06:28.880 If we had viable DNA from a Dodo, we could 0:06:28.960 --> 0:06:32.719 hypothetically implant it into the egg cell of a related 0:06:32.839 --> 0:06:36.359 existing species, probably a type of pigeon, and grow a 0:06:36.440 --> 0:06:40.960 clone of the original Dodo DNA donor, assuming that we 0:06:41.000 --> 0:06:45.200 could get the egg to develop, hatch, and live. But 0:06:45.520 --> 0:06:49.200 we don't have viable DNA so far. The warm climate 0:06:49.200 --> 0:06:52.240 of Mauritius has proven unhelpful in preserving the DNA in 0:06:52.320 --> 0:06:56.040 Dodo's bones, and only relatively poor quality DNA has been 0:06:56.080 --> 0:07:01.320 extracted from the Oxford Dodo. However, our researchers have been 0:07:01.360 --> 0:07:05.360 working on reconstructing the Dodo's genome, which is a complete 0:07:05.440 --> 0:07:09.359 DNA map of a living creature. There's a concept that 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:11.760 we might be able to take a cell from probably 0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:15.680 a pigeon and use modern genetic engineering techniques to edit 0:07:15.720 --> 0:07:19.840 the cell's genome to match the dodos. Again, you'd then 0:07:19.880 --> 0:07:21.960 have to implant the genome into an egg cell, and 0:07:22.000 --> 0:07:24.560 it would have to develop from there, possibly with help 0:07:24.560 --> 0:07:28.960 from a surrogate bird. Now, as of twenty twenty two, 0:07:29.240 --> 0:07:31.720 a team out of UC Santa Cruz reported that they 0:07:31.800 --> 0:07:36.040 have reconstructed the dodo's genome, but there are still lots 0:07:36.040 --> 0:07:39.960 of other problems to crack. Egg pun absolutely intended. Who 0:07:39.960 --> 0:07:43.800 are we kidding? Birds are harder to clone than mammals 0:07:43.960 --> 0:07:46.880 because their egg cells don't develop the same way. It 0:07:46.880 --> 0:07:50.080 would also first have too genetically engineer a pigeon large 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:53.760 enough to develop and lay a Doto egg. And even 0:07:53.800 --> 0:07:56.560 at the point that we managed all of that, this 0:07:56.800 --> 0:08:00.520 hypothetical Dodo chick wouldn't have any family to life to 0:08:00.520 --> 0:08:04.480 to learn how to act like a Dodo. At that point, 0:08:04.520 --> 0:08:07.320 could we really say that we'd resurrected them or just 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:10.440 something that looks like them pretty much as close as 0:08:10.440 --> 0:08:16.840 we figure. It's a lot of expensive questions to answer, though, 0:08:17.000 --> 0:08:21.160 of course, solving problems in genetics has potentially much more 0:08:21.200 --> 0:08:24.760 far reaching results. If we could bring back a Dodo. 0:08:24.960 --> 0:08:28.120 Could we help save existing species before they hit the 0:08:28.120 --> 0:08:32.280 point of extinction? Imagine a future We're going the way 0:08:32.320 --> 0:08:41.680 of the Dodo actually meant making triumphant return. Today's episode 0:08:41.720 --> 0:08:44.520 is based on the article could scientists resurrect the Dodo bird? 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:48.040 On HowStuffWorks dot Com? Written by Jacob Silverman. Brain Stuff 0:08:48.080 --> 0:08:50.520 is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:53.240 dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more 0:08:53.280 --> 0:08:56.920 podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:08:57.040 --> 0:09:08.240 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.