What It Will Take to Create 21st-Century Mammoths, Dodos, and Thylacines [Video]

Colossal Biosciences has generated a flurry of headlines in recent years, as the ‘de-extinction’ company announced plans to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and, most recently, the dodo bird, developing a bioengineering toolkit along the way that has prompted investment from outfits like In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm. Colossal has also acquired a stellar lineup of geneticists, including leading paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro, to help it in its quest to see these proxies of extinct species walk the Earth.

Last month, Shapiro—author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (2015) and Life As We Made It (2021)—leveled up her involvement with the company from an advisory capacity to its chief science officer.

While an exact version of an extinct animal cannot be created, scientists hope they can (to paraphrase the line from Moneyball) recreate the creatures in the aggregate. That means endowing Asian elephants with the long hair and cold resistance of a mammoth and making facsimile dodos spring forth …