In this vast, lovely world of ours, there are many diverse species, yet we know nothing at all about the majority of them. Some of us even pour in a lot of time and effort to know more and explore what else has come before us, and find out more knowledge about everything in our world. With that, a business that is developing technologies that one day might make the dodo bird and woolly mammoth extinct is soliciting money to implement their ambitions.
Knowing More
According to scientists, there are presently roughly 8.7 million different species of plants and animals, but we have only been able to identify about 1.2 million of them, the majority of which are insects. If not for the fact that some species have gone extinct and were considered to be lost forever, the number would be a tiny bit higher. There are many reasons why a species goes extinct, but the claim that “humans kill them all” is one of the more frequent ones.
What Happened Along the Way
The dodo bird was exterminated due to human overhunting, habitat loss, and a lack of ability to compete with the arrival of new creatures to the island of Mauritius. They didn’t even survive 200 years of interaction with people before going extinct because they had no natural predators before we arrived and brought things like rats and pigs with us. Although the specific cause of its extinction is unclear, it is believed that climate change played a significant role because it disrupted their food source and caused a decline in their population before they were eliminated by human hunters. Mammoths grazed on grass, but after the ice age ended, forests and wetlands dramatically reduced the amount of grass the animals could eat, then thus dwindling their chances of survival as well.
The dodo bird and the woolly mammoth are still being sought after, though, and technology company Colossal Biosciences is attracting funding for their initiatives. In order to bring back extinct species, scientists have amassed $225 million in funding over the years. Currently, they are researching how to modify existing creatures’ DNA in an effort to cause them to conceive extinct species. They have a notion of how you might bring back creatures that had gone extinct, but things are still in the very early phases, so don’t expect the dodo or the woolly mammoth to be stomping around the Earth in the near future.