Extinction's Most Famous Bird Has an Understudy. It Can Fly.

In Texas, a flock of shimmering green pigeons is waiting to understudy a bird gone since the 1600s. They can fly. The bird they would play never could.

The understudy is the Nicobar pigeon, from islands in Southeast Asia. The role is the dodo, a hook-beaked ground nester roughly 3 feet (1 meter) tall and up to 50 pounds (23 kilograms), last seen on Mauritius in 1662. People arrived with rats in tow, and within decades the dodo was gone.

Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas, plans to edit dodo traits into Nicobar pigeon cells and reports headway. The company says its dodo genome is 95 percent filled in and that an advance should cut the time it takes to check whether an edit yields the intended trait.

Then there is the face. Ancient DNA survives only in fragments, and with one full dodo genome to work from, it is hard to tell what made the bird a dodo from what made it one particular dodo. Colossal says its answer is an AI platform called GenoMorph, which learned how beaks and skulls develop across upward of 70 bird species alive today. According to the company, that yielded a shortlist of roughly 2,300 candidates tied to the shape and size of beaks, which its scientists are testing in the lab.

Colossal has offered no hatch date. Its CEO, Ben Lamm, told Reuters the open problems include proving which changes matter and stacking many edits into one bird so they get inherited. Mauritius must be ready too, which means clearing introduced predators and repairing habitat.

The pigeons, meanwhile, are doing their part. The Texas flock has grown to 36 birds, which is a lot of understudies for one role.

Read the full story at Reuters, October 14, 2026

Hot Take: Lewis Carroll's Dodo ran a race in which everybody won a prize. The real one may manage the same, since clearing Mauritius of predators for its return benefits the native species already there.