In English there is a saying "extinct like the Dodo bird". This flightless bird became extinct around 1662 because it was aggressively hunted by sailors who arrived on the island of Mauritius. All that remains now is the skeleton and some dried tissue that has been successfully preserved. The dodo became a symbol of species extinction due to human greed.
Now scientists from Colossal Bioscences want to bring the Dodo back from extinction using DNA editing techniques. The dodo will be the first bird species to be "de-extincted" by Colossal, which previously announced plans to do the same to mammoth elephants and Tasmanian tigers.
According to Colossal they have found pluripotem stem cells of Asian elephants, and African elephants to be edited to reproduce mammoths. Dunnart pluripotent stem cells will be used to bring back Tasmanian tigers. Man-made wombs are also being developed so that the embryos of these extinct animals can develop in the bodies of modern animals from similar strains of milk.
This Colossal project received criticism from the scientific community who saw it as impossible and futile. Critics say that if elephant DNA is used as the basis for returned mammoth elephants, the resulting animal is not a mammoth but a human-created hybrid.