Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Volbebam. Here.
Speaker 1: The Dodo, a bird that went extinct in the sixteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and was then made famous in traveling exhibitions and
Speaker 1: works of fiction, may be ready for a comeback. Our
Speaker 1: researchers have been working on the de extinction of the
Speaker 1: dodo for at least twenty years, digging into its DNA
Speaker 1: in hopes of finding a way to resurrect it. But
Speaker 1: let's step back a bit and get to know the dodo,
Speaker 1: an animal that continues to live quite a life in
Speaker 1: popular culture and our lexicon, even after its extinction more
Speaker 1: than three hundred years ago. They lived in the forests
Speaker 1: of Mauritius, what's now an island nation in the Indian
Speaker 1: Ocean east of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, but
Speaker 1: was then an unsettled wilderness. We know that dodos were large,
Speaker 1: flightless birds, land bound cousins of the dove and pigeon,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the details about what they looked
Speaker 1: like and how they lived are based on centuries old
Speaker 1: European travel journals and artists accounts, plus what modern scientists
Speaker 1: have managed to piece together from their remains, we think
Speaker 1: that dodos grew to about two to three feet in
Speaker 1: height up to a meter, and weighed up to forty
Speaker 1: pounds or around seventeen kilos. Their feathers probably varied from
Speaker 1: shades of brown and gray to white and black, and
Speaker 1: they had a large, hooked beat with an exaggerated bulb
Speaker 1: at the tip. Their wings were undersized and not developed
Speaker 1: for flight. Although they've long been portrayed as slow, heavy,
Speaker 1: unintelligent birds, their name has become a synonym for dim witted.
Speaker 1: A recent analyzes show that they were pretty proportionate to
Speaker 1: other birds, no more plump than your average well fed
Speaker 1: pigeon or chicken. Those unkind portrayals dim from the fact
Speaker 1: that when Portuguese and Dutch explorers and colonizers arrived on
Speaker 1: Mauritius starting in fifteen ninety eight, the dodos were filling
Speaker 1: a very specific evolutionary niche. These birds had no natural predators,
Speaker 1: and they didn't fear humans. The curious birds would sometimes
Speaker 1: approach people and could be easily herded into pens or
Speaker 1: onto ships to be used as a food source or
Speaker 1: a traveling curiosity. Their lack of flight, combined with other
Speaker 1: strange seeming actions such as eating small rocks, which scientists
Speaker 1: now believe aided in digestion, contributed to Dodo's reputation as
Speaker 1: stupid lazy birds. The poor things were labeled with the
Speaker 1: species name Ditis ineptus for years after the word inept
Speaker 1: but in reality, the existing bone specimens we have from
Speaker 1: them suggest their feet and claws were powerful along the
Speaker 1: lines of fast, active land birds that run and climb.
Speaker 1: They likely hunted fish and feasted on seeds and fruit.
Speaker 1: They didn't need wings, so their bodies eventually poured those
Speaker 1: resources into other specialties. The dodo is the first animal
Speaker 1: that Europeans found and then found to have disappeared, the
Speaker 1: first case of extinction that European science observed. It was
Speaker 1: a convenient narrative that the birds weren't fit for survival,
Speaker 1: though in reality they were perfectly fit for the environment
Speaker 1: they developed in. The Dodo went extinct because of one reason. Humans,
Speaker 1: the Portuguese and Dutch introduced dogs, rats, pigs, monkeys, cats,
Speaker 1: and other animals to Mauritius. These animals ate the bird's eggs,
Speaker 1: which were laid on the ground. Humans hunted the dodos
Speaker 1: for food, even though the meat reportedly wasn't very good,
Speaker 1: and took Dodoes abroad to be displayed in exhibits. In
Speaker 1: the course of about eighty years, the bird and its
Speaker 1: eggs were hunted to extinction. Over the next century, Tales
Speaker 1: about the Dodo fell almost into legend until a wave
Speaker 1: of new scientific interest hit in the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: leading to an intense public reported scrabble for bones in
Speaker 1: the eighteen sixties. This is also when Lewis Carroll published
Speaker 1: his mythologized depiction of a bumbling gentleman Dodo in his
Speaker 1: book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But going was hard for
Speaker 1: the would be dodo anatomists. The people who had originally
Speaker 1: encountered Dodos hadn't thought to preserve their eggshells or bones.
Speaker 1: For the most part, Many Dodo bones have since been
Speaker 1: discovered in the swamps of Mauritius, but the environment has
Speaker 1: a corrosive effect. Only two complete skeletons have been found,
Speaker 1: one in nineteen oh four and one in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, the bladder of which has been nicknamed Fred.
Speaker 1: There's another specimen of particular interest, a skull from a
Speaker 1: bird that may have been exhibited when it was alive
Speaker 1: in a London shop in the sixteen thirties. It wound
Speaker 1: up in the Oxford Museum, and it's the only known
Speaker 1: Dodo specimen that still has soft tissue attached. Relatively well
Speaker 1: preserved finds like these raised the question could scientists raise
Speaker 1: the Dodo bird, though some experts contend it will never
Speaker 1: be possible. A great debate is underway in science about
Speaker 1: whether it's ethical to bring an extinct species back to life.
Speaker 1: As Jeff Goldbloom's character famously put it in the original
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park film, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether
Speaker 1: or not they could they didn't stop to think if
Speaker 1: they should. And now we're not too worried about rampaging
Speaker 1: herds of dodos. This should is more that okay. But
Speaker 1: some animals are driven to extinction by human action, but
Speaker 1: others simply can't survive in their habitat due to natural
Speaker 1: pressures or because of some major change in climate. Earth
Speaker 1: has gone through several mass extinctions, and bringing back these
Speaker 1: creatures could throw the world's ecosystems into chaos. There's the
Speaker 1: question of where these creatures would go, especially since many
Speaker 1: extinct creatures have no natural predators except for humans. Would
Speaker 1: putting a saber to tiger in the Siberian tundra disrupt
Speaker 1: local food chain in addition to terrorizing the locals. The
Speaker 1: alternative is keeping recreated species in a Jurassic park like
Speaker 1: zoo or nature preserve, but is creating a limited life
Speaker 1: for these creatures itself an ethical All of this aside
Speaker 1: were also stuck on the could part of the equation too.
Speaker 1: If we had viable DNA from a Dodo, we could
Speaker 1: hypothetically implant it into the egg cell of a related
Speaker 1: existing species, probably a type of pigeon, and grow a
Speaker 1: clone of the original Dodo DNA donor, assuming that we
Speaker 1: could get the egg to develop, hatch, and live. But
Speaker 1: we don't have viable DNA so far. The warm climate
Speaker 1: of Mauritius has proven unhelpful in preserving the DNA in
Speaker 1: Dodo's bones, and only relatively poor quality DNA has been
Speaker 1: extracted from the Oxford Dodo. However, our researchers have been
Speaker 1: working on reconstructing the Dodo's genome, which is a complete
Speaker 1: DNA map of a living creature. There's a concept that
Speaker 1: we might be able to take a cell from probably
Speaker 1: a pigeon and use modern genetic engineering techniques to edit
Speaker 1: the cell's genome to match the dodos. Again, you'd then
Speaker 1: have to implant the genome into an egg cell, and
Speaker 1: it would have to develop from there, possibly with help
Speaker 1: from a surrogate bird. Now, as of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: a team out of UC Santa Cruz reported that they
Speaker 1: have reconstructed the dodo's genome, but there are still lots
Speaker 1: of other problems to crack. Egg pun absolutely intended. Who
Speaker 1: are we kidding? Birds are harder to clone than mammals
Speaker 1: because their egg cells don't develop the same way. It
Speaker 1: would also first have too genetically engineer a pigeon large
Speaker 1: enough to develop and lay a Doto egg. And even
Speaker 1: at the point that we managed all of that, this
Speaker 1: hypothetical Dodo chick wouldn't have any family to life to
Speaker 1: to learn how to act like a Dodo. At that point,
Speaker 1: could we really say that we'd resurrected them or just
Speaker 1: something that looks like them pretty much as close as
Speaker 1: we figure. It's a lot of expensive questions to answer, though,
Speaker 1: of course, solving problems in genetics has potentially much more
Speaker 1: far reaching results. If we could bring back a Dodo.
Speaker 1: Could we help save existing species before they hit the
Speaker 1: point of extinction? Imagine a future We're going the way
Speaker 1: of the Dodo actually meant making triumphant return. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is based on the article could scientists resurrect the Dodo bird?
Speaker 1: On HowStuffWorks dot Com? Written by Jacob Silverman. Brain Stuff
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