WIRED, January 2023
Pity the dodo. First, Dutch colonists and their entourage of dogs, cats, and rats erased the birds from their native Mauritius in the late 17th century. Then later generations turned the fat, flightless creature into the butt of jokes for centuries to come. The chonky bird is a byword for clumsy obsolescence. Just look at it: It was practically asking to go extinct.
Except it wasn’t, of course. It was all our fault. The dodo was perfectly adapted to its environment. It was us humans who had to come along and ruin everything with our hunting, murdering, plundering ways. But now a biotech startup called Colossal Biosciences is trying to make amends for humankind’s past sins: It wants to de-extinct the dodo.
