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Comment by joshuahedlund | Hacker News Reader

I've been following Colossal and de-extinction efforts more generally with some interest (Beth Shapiro's books How to Clone a Mammoth and Life as We Made it are very eye-opening both to the weirdness of the advances of the last 10 years and how far we still have to go)

However I'm getting a little cynical/skeptical when Colossal announces new species to their roster without announcing progress on the other ones, especially given my understanding that mammoths are supposed to be one of the easiest (relatively). I'm guessing the Nicobar pigeon to the dodo is much farther than the elephant to the mammoth, and I think Shapiro thought there was something fundamentally more difficult about working with eggs as well.

This page is pretty heavy on pretty graphics and history and pretty light on recent technological breakthroughs that would make this more feasible.

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I can't speak to the validity of their efforts, but that web page does them no favors at all.

It seems like their tools and techniques might have value without achieving de-extinction [1]. If they can't find a way to profit off anything they've done, then I'd be worried.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/09/28/cia-extinction-woolly-ma...

Last I heard, they had already implanted embryos in Indian elephants and the pregnancies, which are twenty something months long, are in process. But it's just something I heard in passing recently so I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in it. Still, it will be very interesting if we have a small heard of mammoths running around next year.

Wow, that's a hell of a lead time! Why not start with something smaller and faster? Even birds have a very seasonal reproduction cycle, why not start with something closer to a model organism. Are there any exotic and extinct rodents out there?

As far as I can tell, the page doesn't mention at all where the Dodo DNA is coming from. They mention chickens and pigeons etc but not Dodo DNA. Maybe I missed something?

This paper [1] shows they extracted the mitochondrial DNA from samples from "the UCSC Paleogenomics ab (samples AMNH 612456, OMNH 1764, AMNH 224546, OMNH 1762, AMNH 616460, Zm1, S1B1, OUMNH 1759), the University of Copenhagen (sample ZMUC AVES-105485), the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre (samples FMNH 47395, FMNH 47396, and FMNH 47397), and Griffith University (sample D3538)".

There is also this one: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-the-oxford-dodo

[1] https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...

I was wondering that, too. But:

> Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project — fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA — based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark.

> The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family — the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. It’s a process which would allow them to narrow down which mutations in the genome “make a dodo a dodo,” Shapiro said.

(https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/31/world/dodo-bring-back-fro...)

From a technology perspective - due to recent advancements in ancient genome sequencing and synthetic biology methods - I find it's a good time to start such a project. Also note that lots of avian genomes have been sequenced in the last years.

Nothing to add but also wanted to shoutout Life as We Made It and How to Clone a Mammoth. Had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Shapiro and she's as pleasant as she is brilliant.

An elephant takes two full years to gestate! While that bun is in the oven what else are they going to be doing!?!?

It's way better to start with something small and non-mammalian!

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