Paleontologist Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York explained how the dodo got its reputation: “It had a catchy name, had a ridiculous appearance, was flightless, and because of its lack of fear toward humans, probably due to its isolated habitat, made easy prey: traits which easily could … All that remained were a few moth-eaten specimens in European museums. Habitat destruction also played its part and by 1680, just eight decades after the island was claimed as Dutch territory, the last dodo had died. The chicks and eggs of the ground-laying bird became easy fodder. The cause of the dodo’s extinction is not entirely clear. The dodo is a close relative of modern pigeons and doves. The dodo, which is now extinct, lived on fruit and nested on the ground. More than 26 million years ago, these pigeon-like birds found paradise while exploring the Indian Ocean: the Mascarene Islands. However, the result may not completely resemble what the flightless bird originally looked like, warned Professor Benton.īy Andrei Ionescu, Earth.The dodo was primarily a forest bird, occasionally venturing closer to the shoreline. “So there needs to be another approach for birds and this is one really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction. There are groups working on different approaches for doing that and I have little doubt that we are going to get there but it is an additional hurdle for birds that we don’t have for mammals.”Īccording to Mike Benton, a professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Bristol, in order to bring this bird back from extinction, scientists will most likely edit Nicobar pigeon DNA to include dodo DNA, since the two species are very closely related genetically. “If I have a cell and it’s living in a dish in the lab and I edit it so that it has a bit of dodo DNA, how do I then transform that cell into a whole living, breathing, actual animal? The way we can do this is to clone it, the same approach that was used to create Dolly the Sheep, but we don’t know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways.” “Mammals are simpler,” Professor Shapiro said. However, according to study leader Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary molecular biologist at UC Santa Cruz, it will most likely be very difficult to bring the dodo back to life. Scientists from UC Santa Cruz used DNA from a dodo specimen kept in the Natural History Museum of Denmark and managed to sequence this bird’s entire genome for the first time (the sequencing has not been published yet). Thus, only 64 years after Dutch sailors had first spotted it, the dodo unfortunately became extinct. Its audacity though, combined with an inability to fly, made it easy prey not only for humans, but also for the cats, dogs, and pigs that they brought with them while exploring the Indian Ocean. Since it lived in isolation on Mauritius for hundreds of years, the dodo bird seemed to be fearless. It weighed about 50 pounds (23 kilograms), had a blue-gray plumage, a huge head, stout yellow legs, and small useless wings. The dodo was discovered in the 16 th century on the island of Mauritius. This accomplishment raises hopes that the bird could be soon brought back to life through genetical engineering. The entire genome of a dodo – a three-feet tall flightless bird that became extinct in the 17 th century – has been sequenced for the first time by a team of scientists led by the University of California, Santa Cruz.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |