Can we bring back the dodo? Inside the $10B bet on de-extinction
By Daily Direct Team · 18 March 2026
The dodo has been dead for 350 years.
It was last seen alive on the island of Mauritius sometime around 1681, hunted to extinction by sailors who found it laughably easy to catch — a flightless bird that had evolved with no natural predators and therefore no fear of humans. It walked up to the men who killed it.
Now a Dallas-based biotechnology company valued at $10.2 billion says it can bring the dodo back. And it wants you to believe this is not just possible, but morally necessary.
Meet Colossal Biosciences
Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021 with a stated mission to resurrect extinct species using genetic engineering. Its first announced target was the woolly mammoth. The dodo followed. So did the Tasmanian tiger, extinct since 1936.
The company has attracted serious money — over $435 million in funding — and serious attention. Its scientific advisory board includes researchers from Harvard, and its arguments are made with the vocabulary of conservation rather than spectacle. This is not Jurassic Park, the company insists. This is ecological restoration.
The pitch goes roughly like this: humans caused these extinctions, directly or indirectly. We now have the tools to reverse some of that damage. Bringing back keystone species could restore ecosystems that have been functionally diminished by their absence. The dodo, for instance, was a seed disperser on Mauritius — its extinction changed the island's forest composition in ways that persist today.
It is a compelling argument. It is also, critics say, a long way from the science.
How de-extinction actually works
The process is not cloning in the Jurassic Park sense. Colossal is not extracting intact dodo DNA from amber and growing a bird in a lab. The dodo's DNA, such as it is, survives only in degraded fragments preserved in museum specimens — bones, feathers, dried tissue.
What Colossal proposes instead is a process closer to genetic editing than resurrection. Scientists sequence the dodo genome as completely as possible from these fragments, identify the genes that made it distinctively dodo-like, then edit the genome of its closest living relative — the Nicobar pigeon — to express those traits. The result would not technically be a dodo. It would be a Nicobar pigeon engineered to resemble one.
This distinction matters more than it might initially seem. Genetics determines physical form, but it does not determine behaviour, culture, or ecological knowledge. A de-extincted dodo would have no mother to learn from, no flock to belong to, no accumulated generational knowledge of how to be a dodo on Mauritius. It would be, in a meaningful sense, a biological approximation — a bird that looks like a dodo without having lived as one.
The same problem haunts every de-extinction project. The woolly mammoth's closest living relative is the Asian elephant, an animal with rich social structures passed down through matriarchal herds over decades. A lab-grown mammoth calf would have none of that. It would be genetically mammoth and behaviourally lost.
The $10 billion question
Colossal's valuation reflects investor belief in the broader platform, not just the dodo. The company's gene-editing tools, if they work, have applications well beyond extinct species — in conservation of living endangered species, in agriculture, potentially in medicine. The de-extinction projects are, in a sense, the most dramatic demonstrations of a technology toolkit that has more mundane but more immediately lucrative uses.
This is worth keeping in mind when evaluating the company's public claims. Announcing a dodo revival generates headlines, funding rounds, and cultural cachet. It also creates pressure to deliver results on a timeline that may not match the actual science.
Critics within the conservation biology community have raised a more pointed objection: the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into de-extinction could instead fund protection of species that are alive right now and sliding toward extinction. Roughly one million species are currently threatened globally. Many could be saved for a fraction of what it costs to attempt the resurrection of one that has been gone for three centuries.
Colossal's counterargument is that the two are not mutually exclusive — that the tools developed for de-extinction directly benefit conservation of living species, and that the public attention generated by a dodo revival funds broader awareness of biodiversity loss. Whether that logic holds up is a genuine empirical question, not a settled one.
What success would actually look like
Suppose it works. Suppose Colossal produces a bird that is, by every measurable genetic standard, a functional dodo. What then?
Mauritius today is a densely populated island nation with a radically altered landscape. The forests the dodo lived in are largely gone, replaced by sugarcane plantations and urban development. Reintroducing a species requires not just the species but the habitat — and rebuilding that habitat is a conservation challenge orders of magnitude larger than the genetics.
This is the gap between what de-extinction can theoretically deliver and what ecological restoration actually requires. Creating the animal is the beginning of the problem, not the solution to it.
The more honest framing, which some Colossal-adjacent scientists have been willing to offer, is that the goal is not really to restore the dodo to Mauritius in any ecologically meaningful sense. It is to demonstrate that the tools exist, build the scientific and public infrastructure to use them, and create a new category of possibility for conservation that did not previously exist.
That is a legitimate goal. It is just a different goal than the one the headlines suggest.
Why it matters anyway
Set aside the scepticism for a moment and consider what it means that this company exists, is valued at $10 billion, and is being taken seriously by credentialed scientists and serious investors.
Twenty years ago, this was science fiction. The ability to sequence degraded ancient DNA, identify the functional significance of specific genes, and edit a living genome with sufficient precision to express extinct traits was not within reach. It is now, at least partially, within reach. The pace at which these tools are developing means that questions about de-extinction are no longer purely hypothetical — they are becoming policy questions, ethics questions, and eventually regulatory questions.
Who decides which species get brought back? Who decides where they go? Who is responsible for the ecological consequences of reintroducing a species into an ecosystem that has spent centuries adapting to its absence? These are not questions the science answers. They are questions that societies will need to answer, probably soon, whether or not Colossal's dodo ever walks the earth.
The bird has been dead for 350 years. The conversation about what to do if we could bring it back is just getting started.
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