(SeaPRwire) – By: Lucas Caldwell
Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences is doing the unthinkable. They are about to bring the dodo back from extinction using artificial intelligence. This is not speculative fiction. It is a concrete timeline with a target window in the early 2030s. A bird that vanished over 350 years ago could be walking the earth again. That should terrify and thrill us in equal measure.
The company proved its capability in 2025. Researchers sequenced ancient DNA from the dire wolf. They edited 14 genes with 20 precise modifications in a living gray wolf cell. They transferred that nucleus into a gray wolf ovum. An embryo developed. It was implanted into a domestic hound. Sixty days later, a puppy wolf was born. The dire wolf returned after more than 10,000 years.
Birds complicate everything. There is no womb to implant into. The approach for the dodo requires harvesting primordial germ cells from the nicobar pigeon, the closest living relative. Those cells get rewritten with dodo traits. They are injected through a chicken egg shell into a microscopic chick embryo. The cells migrate to the developing gonads. When that edited female chick matures and mates with an edited male, the eggs she lays produce a dodo, not a chicken. Chickens are the practical choice here. Nicobar pigeons are seasonal breeders. They lay just two eggs per clutch for a couple months each year. Chickens lay an egg daily. The surrogate logistics demand cold pragmatism.
The sheer scale of the genetic puzzle is what makes this genuinely remarkable. The beak alone involves over 650 regulatory elements linked to size and nearly 1,700 tied to thickness and breadth. Ancient DNA is fragmented. It gives an imperfect record of which switches to flip. Enter GenoMorph. Colossal built an atlas tracking how facial regulatory switches activate and deactivate across chicken, quail, duck, and pigeon embryos. They compared genomes and skull shapes from over 70 bird species. The result is a list of roughly 2,350 genetic switches governing the dodo’s beak. The team is now testing each one individually. Beth Shapiro, the chief science officer, called the dodo genome extraordinary for ancient DNA. Only small holes remain. The specimen was so well preserved that the genome is remarkably complete.
This is where the real story lives. De-extinction is as much a data problem as a biology problem. That is the thesis Ben Lamm, the CEO and co-founder, laid out plainly. AI learns how regulatory DNA shapes living birds. It identifies the genetic switches behind the dodo’s distinctive anatomy. The algorithmic layer is not optional. It is the bridge between degraded fragments and a functional blueprint. Every species on Colossal’s list — the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the moa, the quagga — feeds into the same platform. The dire wolf project taught them how to read genomes. The dodo project teaches them how to read regulatory networks. The next species will benefit from both.
Five years is the stated timeline. That is five years of editing primordial germ cells, injecting chicken eggs, waiting for edited birds to mature, and hoping the regulatory switches actually produce a viable dodo phenotype. Even if the biology works, the ecological question hangs over everything. What does a de-extincted dodo actually do? The bird was hunted to extinction by Portuguese sailors who found it friendly and easy to club. Its ecological niche no longer exists on Mauritius. A dodo walking the Earth is a biological miracle. It is also a creature without a world to belong to. The technology is ready. The question is whether we have the wisdom to let it run.
Author bio: Lucas Caldwell, a tech opinion leader with millions of followers on X/Twitter, covering the intersection of AI, biotechnology, and computational genomics with a focus on de-extinction science and its industry implications.