Company with $225 million plans to bring dodo bird and woolly mammoth back to life
Topics: Animals, Technology, Science
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Élan Images / tilialucida / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Animals, Technology, Science
A company which is working on technology that could one day bring back the dodo bird and woolly mammoth is raising investment to set their plans into action.
There are a lot of different species in this wide, wonderful world of ours and we don't know a thing about most of them.
Scientists estimate there's about 8.7 million different species of plants and animals which currently exist and we've only managed to identify around 1.2 million of them, with most being some sort of insect.
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That number would be a little bit larger but a number of species have become extinct and ended up being gone for good, or so we thought.
There's all sorts of reasons a species goes extinct and 'humans kill them all' is a fairly common one when it comes to chalking up causes of extinction.
In the case of the dodo bird, they were brought down by being overhunted by humans, losing their habitats and failing to compete with the introduction of new animals onto the island of Mauritius.
Lacking any natural predators before we showed up and brought things like rats and pigs with us, they didn't even last 200 years of contact with humans before going extinct.
We ate them and the animals we brought with us ate their eggs, as well as competed with them for their food sources.
Humans first encountered dodo birds in around 1507 and by 1681 they were completely gone, not one of our finest moments as a species.
Woolly mammoths are a different story, almost being wiped out 10,000 years ago and going fully extinct around 4,000 years ago.
It's a bit more difficult to pinpoint exactly how they went extinct, but it's thought that climate change played a major part as it disrupted their food supply and reduced their numbers before they got finished off by human hunters.
Mammoths grazed on grass but when an ice age ended their sources of food were replaced by trees and wetland, severely reducing their numbers.
However, efforts are underway to bring back the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth, with technology company Colossal Biosciences attracting investments for their plans.
Over the years they've raised $225 million in investment to bring back extinct species, and they are studying how to alter the DNA of existing animals to try and get them to give birth to animals which had once all died out.
Things are still in the very early stages, don't expect the dodo or the woolly mammoth to be stomping around the Earth in the near future, but they have an idea of how you would bring back species that had gone extinct.