The biotech startup Colossal promised to resurrect the woolly mammoth and the dodo bird. The intention would be to reintroduce mammoths to Alaska and dodos to Mauritius, where humans made them extinct.
woolly mammoth
The main attraction of the news is, without a doubt, the woolly mammoth. Extinct ten thousand years agois mastodon of 4 meters high and a weight close to ten tons It was brought to popular knowledge by the movie “Ice Age”.
Like their descendants, the elephants, their long trunks were specially adapted for pulling up grass, and their flat, washboard-like teeth were very effective at chewing plants, consuming around 140 kilos of vegetation daily.
According to anthropologists, its fossils were found in the north of the American continent, from Alaska to the south of El Salvador, always near the pine forests. Although it also knew how to adapt to grasslands and tropical forests.
The hypothesis with the greatest scientific support regarding the cause of the disappearance of these elephantids points to climate change. The disappearance of their habitats was compounded by human hunting at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12,000 years ago.
The idea of reviving this species is further supported when Thomas Tull, a technology investor who produced the movie Jurassic World and made money investing in scrubs, stressed: “On the road to bringing back a species, we are going to learn things that we cannot learn in a practical laboratory”.
the dodo bird
Also called The hooded raphus or dronte, this bird was native to the Mauritius Islands, in the Indian Ocean and very close to Madagascar. Before the arrival of humans on that island, two species lived together: the common dodo, which was dark or greyish in color, and the white dodo, the latter lived only on the island of Reunion.
Although it had a beak, feathers, and met all the requirements of being a bird, the dodo bird could not fly.. The reason, according to researchers, is that they adapted to living on these islands without predators, so they did not need to fly. Years of not having that need led the species to shorten its wings and tail.
The dodo bird was one meter tall and weighed between 13 and 23 kg. Its plumage covered its entire body except for the fair part of the face, beak, and legs. Its main characteristic was its long beak, about 20 cm long, and with a slight hook shape. It is believed that with it they broke coconuts, one of their foods.
Although it is an oviparous species, its nests were directly on the ground. According to the documents they found, it is described as a fat and slow bird. Before the arrival of humans on the island, the life of this bird had its days numbered. Europeans really liked their eggs and feathers. Their exotic condition raised the price of the dodo in the old continent.
In 1581, Spanish navigators captured a drone and brought it to Europe. It is said that on that trip and as a consequence of not knowing how to fly and having clumsy movements, the name “dodo” arose, which means “stupid”. One of its best known living and distant relatives is the pigeon.
Although most researchers agree that in 1662 this species was already extinct; some authors debate that the white drone became extinct almost a century later.
NT / ED
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