A Texas biotech says it’s cleared a crucial hurdle on the long road to reviving the dodo, the famously flightless bird that vanished from Mauritius in the late 1600s and became shorthand for extinction. Colossal Biosciences revealed it has, for the first time, grown pigeon primordial germ cells—the precursor cells that eventually become sperm and eggs—long enough to make them useful.
“Our avian team’s breakthrough…is a significant advancement for dodo de-extinction,” co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm said, framing the work as a win for both species revival and conservation tools.
If that sounds obscure, here’s why it matters. Birds can’t be cloned the way mammals can, because development happens inside an egg. To “build” a dodo-like bird, scientists need working germ cells they can edit and pass down through breeding. Until now, researchers only had a reliable lab “recipe” for chicken and goose germ cells; even closely related birds like quail wouldn’t cooperate. Colossal’s avian team tested hundreds of mixtures of growth factors and metabolites before landing on one that keeps rock dove (aka pigeon) germ cells alive in culture for weeks. Avian species director Anna Keyte called it a “pivotal step,” because pigeons are distant cousins of the dodo, and the method can be adapted to the dodo’s closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon.
From here, the plan looks more like careful husbandry than sci-fi cloning. Colossal is raising a Nicobar pigeon colony in Texas, harvesting and growing their germ cells, and then editing them with dodo-specific traits reconstructed from museum DNA. Those edited cells would be injected into chicken embryos engineered not to make their own germ cells, turning roosters and hens into surrogates for Nicobar cells. Breed the resulting birds—moms and dads have to be made separately—and, generation by generation, you get offspring with more dodo-like biology. “We have to make two generations,” chief science officer Beth Shapiro said, noting the bird pathway is slow by design. Even with everything going right, the company says the timeline is measured in years, not months.
The announcement lands alongside fresh cash—another $120 million, taking total funding past half a billion—and amid Colossal’s splashy ambitions beyond the dodo. The startup has touted projects aimed at a mammoth-like elephant, the thylacine and the moa, and it drew headlines this spring by claiming dire wolf pups created via ancient DNA and gene editing. Supporters see the dodo work as the more technically transformative effort because avian reproduction has been the field’s bottleneck.
Plenty of scientists also urge caution about the word “resurrection.” Even boosters concede what’s possible is a functional stand-in with key dodo traits, not a perfect genetic duplicate of an extinct bird shaped by long-lost environments and behaviors. That said, the new pigeon-cell toolkit could be a boon for living species. Conservation geneticists are eyeing it for endangered birds with shallow gene pools, from disease-prone island pigeons to raptors hammered by habitat loss. The same culture, editing and surrogate techniques could add resilience where it’s desperately needed.
For now, the milestone is technical but tangible: a reliable way to grow the very cells that make eggs and sperm in a bird lineage that actually matters for the dodo. In a field that often overpromises, that’s real progress—less Jurassic Park and more patient, methodical biology. As Lamm put it, the investment is building tools that can serve de-extinction and conservation at once. Whether a dodo-like bird ever struts across Mauritius again, the path to get there just got a lot clearer.
New York Post, CNN, and Axios contributed to this report.
The latest news in your social feeds
Subscribe to our social media platforms to stay tuned