What extinct animal does Paris Hilton want as a pet and asks genetics to revive it?

dodo It is one of the the animals symbolic when it comes to touching an object species extinction. he Dodo or Dronte It was a bird of its own and almost exclusively L.’s Moluccas(Mauritius Island and Reunion Island) is an archipelago located in eastern Indian Ocean in Indonesia.

According to scientific evidence It evolved from the passenger pigeon that traveled between Africa and Southeast Asia, which settled on these islands, and settled when suitable climatic conditions were found, without seasonal changes, so that over the centuries they lost their complete ability to fly because there were no natural predators there. it seems, Paris HiltonHowever, after many years, he has a weakness for this animal.

“The dodos were flightless birds, that is, they could not leave the islands to which they had adapted. Everything seemed to indicate that it was a bird that weighed between nine and seventeen kilograms, chubby and lazy and a clumsy one that would be hard to match. Anyway, the fact is that a bird The dodo had no defense and became extinct a few years after its discovery,” explained Dr. Juan E. Romero on a recent note,” explained Dr. Juan E. Romero in a recent note.

Its common name appears to derive from the Portuguese expression doudo or doido which seems to mean “stupid”, “clumsy”, or “foolish”.. This is a flightless endemic bird that was only found on the island of Mauritius. Europeans were so captivated by his personality that he became an object of hunting. Until it finally disappeared.

This story is connected to the ambitious project to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. This is the science project he runs Famous geneticist George Church of Harvard UniversityWhich aspires to see hybrids of these species walking in the Arctic It disappeared from the face of the earth between 10,000 and 1700 BC.

said one of the investors in the project and co-founder of the company that runs Bin Lam.

George Church, 67, professor of genetics Robert Winthrop at Harvard Medical School He is known as the father of synthetic biology. His work, along with that of other scientists, was instrumental in the development of gene-editing Crispr technology, with which scientists can alter DNA sequences and modify the function of genes for purposes such as correcting defects and genetics or making crops more resistant. It is a technology that was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2012.

Now Hilton’s name sounded high this week after a group of scientists and technologists contemplated sequencing the genome of a no longer extant species like the dodo, from available genetic material. The idea is to find living relatives.

The question is that it was collected $60 million to this end. Behind the project is Thomas Tull and Robert Nielsen, who, along with the businesswoman and Paris Hilton, support and work in a new technology category, a startup seeking “de-extinction”.

The dodo, which makes a minor appearance in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, today has little genetic material available because the living species to which it is most closely related is the distantly related Nicobar pigeon. This is why scientists have some doubts about this goal. Colossal Biosciences is the company behind this ambitious dodo resurrection project.

Sailors sailing in those seas used to catch dodos very easily because they were flightless and clumsy when flying. “The fact that this gigantic pigeon was increasingly rare increased its reputation as an exclusive delicacy, increasing demand for it until, within a few years, it completely disappeared,” Romero explained.

“The hunting of sailors alone was not responsible for their extinction; besides them, other species arrived in the Moluccas, such as pigs, dogs, cats, rats, and others, accompanied by the viruses and bacteria they carried, which did not contribute to their survival at all.”

The last confirmed specimen of the dodo, which measured one meter in height and weighed about 20 kilograms, was reported between 1662, with another dubious sighting in 1674.” What is certain is that no dodo reached the eighteenth century alive. At about the same time that the last dodo disappeared, another similar species was discovered, which certainly evolved in the same way on an island on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the Rodrigues solitaire.”

According to the story, the colonists had a craving for the meat of these birds and they especially valued the meat of their own chicks. The tragic disappearance of the dodo did not prevent his cousin Rodrigues from suffering the same fate, and the species was declared extinct in 1755.

The third protagonist of the forced extinction of the species is the partridge or racing pigeon, whose name in itself can be a very promising identification for hunters of these birds.

The story of the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire was repeated in the 20th century with the indigenous partridge dove on some islands on the other side of New Guinea.

The presence of this species on the island is consistent with the same reasons as the previous cases, that is, the passenger pigeon has adapted to the island’s environment to become sedentary. Some samples were brought to the West and released in 1904. When new expeditions were organized in 1927 and 1929 to obtain a few more specimens, none were found anymore,” Romero said.

He concluded: “Traditionally, the disappearance of these isolated species has been blamed on their indiscriminate hunting by sailors for meat, although it currently seems to be proven that although the causes of these extinctions are linked to the arrival of humans on these islands, it was not the work of hunting The direct cause is the only one, and the introduction of the species that arrived with them, such as cats, dogs, rats or pigs, as well as diseases to which these birds had no defenses or shifted in. The habitat that sheltered them through slashing and burning and the expansion of agricultural borders are indicated as causes of at least the same weight. Transcendent is that the examples cited are only some of the consequences of the actions of the species: the human being, the only one who by his action has brought about the extinction of others.

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