The TERRIBLE LIZARD aka Dinosaurs thread

 

Theory of a Deadman - Dinosaur

https://apnews.com/article/spinosaurus-field-museum-chicago-dinosaur-skeleton-display-c1ad0d81b4289c77ba1af72eeb989515
Field Museum debuts Spinosaurus exhibit featuring largest predatory dinosaur
By TERESA CRAWFORD and KATHLEEN FOODY
June 2, 2023
CHICAGO (AP) — The newest addition to the Field Museum on Chicago’s lakefront will give visitors a glimpse of the largest predatory dinosaur yet discovered via a 46-foot (14.02 meter) cast of a Spinosaurus skeleton suspended high above the museum’s main hall.

Field Museum officials unveiled the cast with its distinctive fin and crocodile-like jaws on Friday. It will be available for visitors starting Saturday.

Scientists have long struggled to interpret Spinosaurus fossils to determine the animal’s behavior in life, uncertain whether it swam while hunting or simply waded into water in search of prey. Field Museum researcher Matteo Fabbri said the cast is about 60% of a skeleton, the most complete specimen of the species.

“Spinosaurus is a very weird animal,” Fabbri said. “The proportions of the entire body are incredibly weird in comparison to any other dinosaur. The tail is extremely long, the legs are incredibly short, and the skull reminds (us) of the ones we find in modern crocodiles.”

Fabbri is among a team of researchers who in March published an article concluding that the density of Spinosaurus fossils means they likely did go underwater to hunt. The team compared fossils with other dinosaurs, extinct marine reptiles and living animals including seals and whales — knowing that animals that swim underwater for food have bones that are nearly solid compared to those that remain on land.

The exhibit team at the Field decided to display the Spinosaurus cast with that finding in mind, said Ben Miller, Field Museum exhibition developer.

“We decided to put Spinosaurus in a swimming pose because that’s how it would have spent most of its life,” Miller said. “This is a semiaquatic animal. It would have lived kind of like a crocodile, kind of hanging around in rivers, catching fish.”

According to the museum, a team of artists in Italy created the cast based on fossils found in northern Africa’s Sahara Desert where the Spinosaurus lived nearly 100 million years ago. The original fossils are kept at the Hassan II University of Casablanca in Morocco.

The only other cast of a Spinosaurus is on display in Japan.

The Field Museum’s Spinosaurus cast joins a cast of the plant-eating Titanosaur in its’ main hall, dubbed “Máximo” and already a popular exhibit. That cast measures 122 feet (37.19 meters) across and stands 28 feet tall (8.53 meters) and represents the largest of all dinosaurs researchers have discovered.

Jurassic Park but with a Cat

Scientists say they’re closer to reviving mammoths. What could go wrong?

The plan to bring back the woolly mammoth — or at least a version of it — is ambitious but raises hairy questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/06/scientists-say-theyre-step-closer-reviving-mammoths-what-could-go-wrong/





A company aiming to bring extinct animals back from the dead said it has taken an elephant-sized step toward genetically resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a wild if contentious goal to repopulate the Arctic tundra with a missing titan.

Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company based in Dallas, announced Wednesday it has produced a line of Asian elephant stem cells that can be coaxed to transform into other types of cells needed to reconstruct the extinct giant — or at a least a mammoth-like elephant designed to thrive in the cold.

“It’s probably the most significant thing so far in the project,” said George Church, a Harvard geneticist and Colossal co-founder. “There are many steps in the future.”

For proponents, bringing back vanished animals is a chance to correct humanity’s role in the ongoing extinction crisis. Breakthroughs in their field, they say, may yield benefits for animals still with us, including endangered elephants.

Yet the technical challenges of birthing into the world a living, breathing mammoth remain, well, colossal. And the project raises hairy ethical questions: Who decides what comes back? Where will the reborn species go? Could the money be better spent elsewhere? And how hard will “de-extinction,” as the revival efforts are known, be on the animals themselves?

“The lack of knowledge is the thing that worries me about the welfare of animals,” said Heather Browning, a philosopher at the University of Southampton in England and a former zookeeper.

Can we really bring back the mammoth?

During the last ice age, the woolly mammoth owned the top of the world, plodding across Eurasia and North America and as far south as the modern-day Midwest.

As the creatures died out 4,000 years ago, some carcasses froze over in icy tundra that preserved not only their bones but also their flesh and fur, giving paleontologists the chance to collect DNA fragments. Some mammoth meat was so well kept that at least one adventurous researcher has eaten it.

By 2015, scientists sequenced its genetic blueprint well enough to offer a potential manual for remaking a mammoth. But to test what exactly each of these genes do — which give the beast their curved tusks, fatty build and, of course, thick fur — Church wants elephant stem cells in which he could engineer mammoth DNA and grow tissue samples.

Scientists have produced such stem cells in the lab for other animals, including humans, mice, pigs and even rhinos. But for years, getting the right elephant stem cells to test all those cold-climate characteristics proved elusive, in part because elephant cells’ ability to avoid cancer made reprogramming them difficult.

Colossal said they have produced the stem cells they need by suppressing the anti-cancer genes and bathing the cells in the right chemical cocktail. Colossal published a preprint Wednesday that is not yet peer-reviewed. The company said it is working to place the study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“It hasn’t been straightforward,” said Eriona Hysolli, the company’s head of biological sciences. “It hasn’t been immediately obvious. There were a lot of innovations along the way.”

Jeanne Loring, a researcher at the Scripps Research in California who helped develop potent stem cells for the northern white rhinoceros, said the work showed the elephant researchers’ persistence. “This is an incredibly steep hill they have ahead,” she added. “The challenges get bigger and bigger with the size of the animal.”

Eventually, the company wants to genetically edit a nucleus of a stem cell with mammoth genes and fuse it into an elephant egg. From there, if everything goes according to plan — still a big if — they will implant the embryo in an elephant surrogate and wait for it to give birth.

Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, said all those “ifs” may be insurmountable. There is no guarantee that the modified chromosomes can be introduced to an elephant cell, or if that an embryo will take hold in an elephant womb.

And perhaps more profoundly, there is the question of how a mammoth, if born, will learn to behave like a mammoth. “Most of the mammals and birds that are being talked about have complex social and cultural interactions that have been lost,” Cobb said. “They are not simply their genes.”

Modern elephants, for instance, are highly social beings, passing down knowledge about the location of watering holes and other survival skills from one generation to the next. Their ancient cousins may be similar. “They’ve got no elders to raise them, to teach them,” Browning said. “They’re got no way of learning how to be mammoths.”

And any living surrogate elephant meant to gestate and give birth to a new mammoth will go through some degree of hardship. “How many dead elephants are we willing to have to get one woolly one?” said Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist specializing in ancient elephants at the University of Sheffield in England.

Colossal said its long-term goal is to use artificial wombs to gestate the animals, itself a tall technological task. The company notes that its research into elephant cells can help with current conversation efforts, such as potential treatments for a form of herpes that kills young elephants. Indeed, the company hopes to make money by licensing or selling some of the technologies it creates along the way.

“It’s not so much bringing back the mammoth, it’s saving an endangered species,” Church said. “It’s working out technology that’s useful for conservation and climate change.”

But Cobb said the biggest threats facing elephants are hunting, habitat destruction and other conflicts with humans. “How will a greater understanding of cell biology help?”

One of Colossal’s overarching arguments for bringing back the mammoth is climate change. Scientists at the company say future Arctic herds can stomp down permafrost and prevent more of it from thawing and releasing atmosphere-warming carbon into the air.

“They’re a lot of reasons to restore that environment to what it was,” Church said. “This is the keystone species that’s missing for that.”

Then there is this philosophical question: Is a bioengineered mammoth truly a mammoth? Or is it a furrier elephant that can tolerate the cold?

“It’s a completely new organism that’s being created,” Herridge said. She added that it is still an open question as to what killed off the woolly mammoth: Was it humans overhunting them, or the natural end of the last ice age? If the answer is the latter, then the Arctic may be unsuitable for the resurrected creature, whatever you want to call it.

“I would love to see a mammoth alive,” she said. “I would absolutely love to have a time machine where I could go back to the ice age, and I could see a herd of mammoths being mammoths in the landscape in which they evolved.”

“But all of that has gone.”

Synthwave Raptor Jesus Loves You

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Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal | Season 2 OFFICIAL TRAILER | adult swim

Prehistoric Planet — Official Trailer | Apple TV+


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Jurassic Park - That is one big pile of shit




That is one big pile of shit!




That is One Big Pile of Shit

JURASSIC WORLD HUNGRY DINOSAURS THE MUSICAL - Animated Song

From fossil dung, scientists reconstruct the rise of the dinosaurs

The research has shed light on the emergence of large dinosaurs and their geographic spread, as well as the role of environmental changes in their evolution.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/11/27/fossil-poop-reveals-dinosaur-rise/




Trackway of a large theropod dinosaur from the early Jurassic in Soltykow, Poland. (Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki)


When paleontologist Martin Qvarnström began peering inside 230-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur dung using an advanced X-ray technology, he wasn’t sure he’d see anything of interest.

But embedded in ancient excrement, he discovered multitudes. Scans revealed tiny beetles with antennas and delicate legs intact, crushed bones from extinct crocodile ancestors, half-digested fish and an abundance of plant life within the bromalites — fossilized feces and vomit — of early dinosaurs and the creatures that roamed alongside them.

From paleontological poop, Qvarnström and colleagues reconstructed the ecology, biology and food webs that wove together the early dinosaur ecosystem in the Polish Basin in central Europe from 230 to 200 million years ago. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, focuses on a critical, but obscure, period in the late Triassic and early Jurassic, when the first dinosaurs appeared in that region and rose to dominance — part of a major turnover in life on Earth.

The picture that emerges from the study of more than 500 bromalites — mostly coprolites, or droppings — is one of a gradual process of change. Small dinosaur ancestors opportunistically took advantage of food sources made more abundant by environmental changes, evolved into larger creatures and widened their ecological niche.

Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, called the deep dive into dino droppings “insightful and innovative,” for putting some of the “most maligned fossils” under scrutiny.

“Academic paleontologists can be prone to toilet humor too,” Brusatte wrote in an email. “But wow, [bromalites] can give us a lot of information. This is exactly what we need to understand the predator and prey links from millions of years ago.”




Excavations in the Late Triassic locality at Lisowice, Poland, one of the studied sites. It yielded a large number of coprolites of predators and herbivores. (Krystian Balanda)


A hidden story in fossilized feces

The celebrities of the paleontological world tend to have giant footprints and outsize bodies — the fearsome apex predators and charismatic herbivores whose skeletons fill museum halls and ignite the imagination.

Fossilized digestive contents, on the other hand, tend to be stored in basements and are often the object of jokes, said Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and the senior author of the study. “Coprolites ... ha ha,” he said, imitating how people sometimes respond when they learn what he studies.

But look close enough, and they can reveal details about how dinosaurs lived — who and what they ate, how they fit into their ecosystems and how that changed over time.

“Inside these coprolites is a story about life and the biology of these early dinosaurs,” Niedźwiedzki said.

The authors used their study to construct a food web, with arrows showing what and who prehistoric creatures were chowing on. When the first dinosaur ancestors came on the scene in present-day Poland some 230 million years ago, they were small, omnivorous and opportunistic silesaurids. The study reveals they filled their stomachs with tiny beetles, among other food.

Carnivorous dinosaurs appeared around 220 million years ago. Herbivorous dinosaurs emerged about 10 million years later. Around 200 million years ago, the plant-eaters may have gained an advantage when the climate became more humid, favoring dinosaurs with a wider palate, who expanded from a mostly conifer diet to consume ferns and other plants that became more abundant.

This dietary flexibility may have helped allow for the emergence of larger dinosaurs. Then, they began to become far more diverse and spread geographically.

“The study shows the subtle interplay of climate, mainly arid, and eventually humid, and how climate mainly affected the dominant plants, which in turn gave opportunities for new herbivores at certain points,” said Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.



Large theropod dinosaur footprint from the early Jurassic site in Poland. (Gerard Gierlinski) (Gerard Gierlinski)


Coprolites from the early Jurassic of Soltykow, Poland. (Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki)

New attention to the dawn of the dinosaurs

While the question of how the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct is a source of wide fascination, the question of how they came to rule in the first place remains remarkably obscure. Did dinosaurs outcompete amphibians, other reptiles and large herbivores due to their physical prowess? Or did environmental changes pave the way for their success?

The new study closely followed the record in one part of the world, and a similar approach could now be used in other regions, to discern if the food webs were similar and identify differences in how dinosaurs rose to dominance.

The new study favors the idea that dinosaurs were well-suited to take advantage of changes in the prehistoric environment, but also reveal that the age of the dinosaurs had a slow, complicated start.

“Dinosaurs did not simply sweep across ancient Poland and the rest of the world soon after they originated, like a marauding army,” Brusatte said. “It took them time, and patience, and a lot of adaptation, all while being affected by the evolutionary whims of the other organisms in their food webs.”


whats brown and sounds like a bell?

Ancient DNA sheds light on how dogs and humans bonded in Americas

What a salmon diet tells us about how dogs formed close bonds with humans 12,000 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/12/04/ancient-dogs-americas-dna-bond/


When archaeologists discovered the shin bone of a 12,000-year-old creature from Swan Point in the Alaskan interior, they were eager to use ancient DNA analysis to learn what they had discovered. A wolf? Or could this be one of the oldest dogs yet discovered in the Americas?

Deeper study raised more questions than it answered. The Swan Point canid — the group that includes wolves, coyotes and dogs — didn’t resemble any known dog genetically. But it ate like a dog.

A chemical analysis of the bone revealed that the Swan Point canid scarfed down a diet heavy in salmon, in stark contrast to other ancient wolves from the same region that ate a terrestrial diet — evidence, the authors argue in the journal Science Advances, of the antiquity of the human-dog bond during the early peopling of the Americas.

“It’s not related to the dog populations that we know,” said François Lanoë, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Arizona. “Behaviorally, it probably behaved like a dog. Even if it was a wolf, it was a tamed wolf, which is you can think of it as a preliminary stage of domestication because it was most likely fed by people directly.”

How and when wolves became humans’ companions and partners — hunters, guards, “dogs” — remains a controversial and mysterious topic in science. The study published Wednesday won’t settle the question. Instead, it adds a trove of data on ancient dogs’ and wolves’ DNA and diet that will help scientists trying to piece together more about the complicated relationship between humans and canids.

“It is very interesting, but perhaps not surprising, if there existed some kind of experimentation early on in dog domestication, at the end of the Pleistocene, where people were living with and feeding wild canids,” Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo not involved in the study, wrote in an email. “Some of these canids may have been kept as pets and bred and left a genetic legacy in later dog lineages, while others represented fleeting relationships and left no genetic trace. Dog domestication was a messy process, and this study adds a new piece to the puzzle!”

The origins of man’s best friend
Dogs were the first domesticated animal. But where and when wolves turned into man’s best friend remains controversial — somewhere in Eurasia, probably somewhere around 20,000 years ago, though it depends which expert you ask and the estimates span a wide range. Dogs have long been presumed to have been part of the equally scientifically contentious story of the peopling of the Americas, though it’s not clear the first people to migrate into the Americas brought dogs with them.

There are many gaps in that archaeological record. There have been 9,900-year-old dog remains found in present-day Illinois, a 10,000-year-old fragment of a bone in Alaska and 13,100-year-old remains discovered in a cave in coastal British Columbia. The study published Wednesday draws on new and old specimens to compile an exhaustive database of 76 ancient canids from Alaska, including dogs, coyotes and wolves. The Swan Point specimen is one of them, along with an 8,100-year-old jawbone from a wolflike creature that also fed heavily on salmon. These finds underscore that “dog domestication” is a tidy label for a relationship that was less straightforward than the name suggests.

Wolves evolved into dogs, with changes in how their bodies are built — shorter snouts, for example — and in their genetics. But focusing solely on changes in DNA and bones, which occur over a long time frame, may miss out on the behaviors in between that help produce those changes, the scientists argue.

“Just looking at genetics and domestication kind of fails to see that intermingling part, where you have individuals interacting with canids. And that’s a relationship that we kind of want to get at,” said Joshua Reuther, an archaeologist with the University of Alaska Museum of the North and one of the authors of the paper.

What is a dog?

The authors argue that while they can’t classify the Swan Point canid as a dog, they have found a creature that was in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans. But that assertion, like nearly everything in the scientific debate about dog domestication, won’t convince everyone.

The wolf may have simply been eating salmon naturally, without human help, said Mikkel Sinding, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

“It is a wolf that ate like later dogs. There are several possible explanations,” Sinding wrote in an email. “Yes, humans could have fed it, but it could also just naturally have had this diet.”

If people were feeding it, it is impossible to know the nature of its relationship to humans — was it tame? Was it a companion? But the study puts forward a wealth of information on the ancestry and diet of ancient canids, which could help researchers trying to untangle the puzzle of people’s long-standing relationship with these wolflike, doglike creatures that may have been part of human life.

“Indigenous peoples throughout North America highly value canids, and wolves often take a really huge part — they feature prominently in origin stories,” said Audrey Lin, a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History. “Any study that addresses this deep relationship between humans and wolves and the deep respect that they have for wolves is really cool.”

‘Dinosaur highway’ from 166 million years ago is unearthed
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Four giant herbivores and one predator walked across the same spot in modern-day England. “It’s the closest we’ll get to a time machine,” said one of the lead excavators.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/01/06/dinosaur-footprints-megalosaurus-oxfordshire-england/


Drone footage shows newly unearthed dinosaur footprints



Drone footage taken between June 15-22, 2024, shows the 166-million-year-old dinosaur footprints found at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (Video: University of Birmingham)


According to new research, at least five of them crossed an intersection in southern England some 166 million years ago, leaving behind 200 footprints that researchers have dubbed the “dinosaur highway.”

Scientists said the tracks in Oxfordshire, unearthed last summer after a quarry worker spotted unusual bumps on the ground, represent the most significant finding of dinosaur tracks in this country in decades and offer a glimpse into how two species interacted with their surroundings.

“For something of this scale to have been preserved for so long, giving us a snapshot of what tropical Oxfordshire looked like 166 million years ago — when these animals were just going about their day — it’s pretty special,” said Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham in England who helped lead the excavation.

“It’s the closest we’ll get to a time machine,” she said in a phone interview Monday.

Experts from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham counted four sets of extensive tracks at the site left by sauropod dinosaurs, most likely four Cetiosaurus — long-necked herbivores — the biggest of which measured 60 feet in length. A fifth set of tracks was left, they believe, by a Megalosaurus, a 30-foot carnivorous theropod with distinctive three-toed claws that typically weighed over two British tonnes, equivalent to an SUV.




A dinosaur footprint found at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (Emma Nicholls/University of Birmingham/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)


The longest of the trackways extends unbroken for almost 500 feet, with the largest individual footprint measuring 20 inches deep. At one point, the tracks left by the carnivore and an herbivore even intersect, raising questions about interactions between them.

Paleontologists place great value on footprints because, in many ways, they contain more knowledge than a fossil can convey. “They give us a glimpse into the life of the dinosaur, what it was actually doing,” Edgar said.

For example, the theropod track squishes into the largest of the sauropod tracks, suggesting the theropod came afterward. “Whether or not that was an hour and he was stalking them, or if this was days later and this was a frequently used spot to get from Point A to Point B, we don’t know,” Edgar said.

Four of the five dinosaurs were moving in the same northerly direction, matching the direction of the vast majority of other dinosaur footprints left nearby. It’s not possible to say whether the animals shared a destination, but Edgar speculated that the sauropods could have made up a herd, which this species is known to have moved in.

It’s also unclear whether the tracks were left at the same time, but because of the way they were preserved, it is likely that they were left no more than weeks or months apart, if not closer, Edgar said.

She said the scale of the site was immense: “Everywhere you point, you see another dinosaur track. ‘There’s another one. There’s another,’” she said, recalling her first visit to the site. “They were walking through 166 million years ago, and there you are today standing in their footprint.” In one of the theropod tracks, there was an observable stumble, she added.

By identifying the microfossils in the surrounding rock, scientists were able to date the tracks to the Middle Jurassic Period, around 166 million years ago, when both dinosaurs were present in modern-day Britain. At that time, when the global climate was warmer and sea levels higher, the area was largely submerged in water, with shallow lagoons separated by mudflats.

The tracks were preserved for millennia because they were marked in sediment that was soft and fine enough to leave prints — but not so wet that they could not retain a shape. “It’s like Goldilocks; it needs to be just right,” said Edgar, referring to the moisture content. The prints were then covered by fresh layers of sediment and preserved, she said.




An undated photo shows an aerial view of dinosaur footprints found at Dewars Farm Quarry. (University of Birmingham/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)


The quarry where the footprints were discovered has proved to be something of a treasure trove for paleontologists, where some 40 other tracks were discovered in 1997. One of the trackways found at that time was also left by a Megalosaurus — the first dinosaur to be named and categorized by scientists in 1824.

For the most recent finding, scientists studied the site using drone and conventional photography, combining over 20,000 pictures to create 3D models of the site, offering a glimpse into the way these dinosaurs moved.

The evidence suggested to the scientists that those dinosaurs walked, rather than sprinted or trotted, Edgar said.

The tracks left by the likely Megalosaurus measured around 26 inches in length each, separated by a stride length of nine feet. According to Edgar, this meant that the dinosaur was traveling around 3 mph, the same speed as the average human walk.




An undated photo shows teams working on dinosaur footprints found at Dewars Farm Quarry. (Caroline Wood/University of Birmingham/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)


Of the other tracks, left by the likely Cetiosaurus, the longest measured 35 inches, which scientists believe meant the dinosaur was moving at around the same speed.

“It’s very rare in the U.K. to make really big finds,” Edgar said. “It’s amazing.”

JURASSIC PARK - Here we come!

The dodo bird is extinct. This scientist says she can bring it back.

The company she works for is betting millions it can realize a once-far-fetched idea of “de-extinction.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/01/25/de-extinction-beth-shapiro/


DALLAS — The place where the dead may be brought back to life is a drab, single-story building in an office park next to a semitruck lot.

Inside, between rows of incubators and microscopes, Beth Shapiro and her team are attempting a feat straight out of science fiction: reviving the dodo, a bird that’s been extinct for more than three centuries.

A growing group of scientists is trying to bring back extinct animals, an idea that is drawing closer than ever due to recent advances in gene editing.

Shapiro, one of the world’s leading experts on finding and decoding strains of genetic material from long-lost animals, has already done more than anyone to reveal the secrets of the dodo, the flightless icon of extinction that inspired generations to protect still-living species from vanishing.

Yet in the not-so-distant past, Shapiro didn’t see why the dodo needed to make a comeback. Like many skeptics of the idea of “de-extinction,” she once thought there was no point to bringing back an extinct animal with no home to go to.

Now, unlike the dodo, Shapiro is adapting. She took leave from a cushy university gig last year to become chief science officer at Colossal, a Dallas-based bioscience firm that has raised $435 million in funding, including $200 million announced this month.

“As the world changes and technology changes, as a scientist, you should adapt,” she said before slipping on a white lab coat over another recent change — a tattoo of a dodo on her arm. “And your opinion of what is possible should adapt to that.”

For Shapiro, it’s not just about the dodo. The scientific breakthroughs she hopes to make may not only revive extinct species but also save animals at the brink today, she said.

Still, as she takes on this job, Shapiro still dwells on some of the same questions she had as a critic: not only how, scientifically, to bring it back, but how to do it ethically.

Extinction
Shapiro, 49, never planned to be a DNA hunter. Raised in northwest Georgia, she enrolled at the University of Georgia intent on becoming a broadcast journalist. But a nine-week geology and anthropology program during which she toured the country and camped in national parks got her hooked on digging through dirt.

After winning a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, she joined the lab of Alan Cooper, a pioneer in the brand-new field studying ancient DNA.

“He said, ‘If you join my lab, you can go to Siberia.’ And I was like, ‘That sounds like a great opportunity,’” she said.

Instead of studying extinct animals by analyzing the shape of their skeletons, as traditional paleontologists do, ancient DNA researchers scour dusty museums for specimens and remote tundra for bones from which to pluck strains of genetic material and unravel the secrets of how prehistoric creatures lived and evolved.

The field was hot, and Shapiro was trying to make a name for herself in it.

“It was a very male-dominated field, and there was a lot of ego,” said Duane Froese, an earth scientist at the University of Alberta who trekked into the Klondike with Shapiro to find ancient bison, bear, horse and mammoth bones. Shapiro was the “glue” that kept scientific collaborations from falling apart over disagreements, he said. “She’s often very good at bringing everybody back together.”

During the course of her career, Shapiro searched for DNA-rich fossils in frigid permafrost and on tropical islands. But one of her first big breaks came while walking the halls of Oxford.

“Every day going into the lab, I would have to pass this dodo specimen,” she said. “It was there in front of me all the time, this icon of extinction.”

When she first asked to be the first geneticist to get her hands on the icon, Oxford’s museum said no.

“She often goes against the flow,” said Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioral ecologist who was a fellow with her at Oxford and who today is a professor at Princeton University. “She’s not timid in tackling wicked problems.”

The Oxford specimen is famous. No one is quite sure how it was acquired, but it probably served an inspiration for the Lewis Carroll character who goaded Alice to compete in an absurd footrace in Wonderland in which everyone won.

In real life, the dodo lost. After the Dutch settled its home, the island of Mauritius, in the 17th century, it took less then three decades for the bird, which laid only one egg a year, to go extinct. The odd, flightless bird didn’t fear humans, who clubbed it for a quick meal. Stowaway rats raided the eggs of the rest.

Even in death, a question persisted: What exactly was it? For centuries, no one was sure what type of bird the dodo was. “This was a genuine mystery,” Shapiro said.

After proving herself with ancient DNA work on other birds, Shapiro convinced the museum to let her take a chunk of leg bone. Publishing their results in the journal Science, she and her colleagues discovered the dodo is a big, overgrown pigeon.

Evolution
For Shapiro, ancient DNA filled an itch for adventure, allowing her to travel into the past. It was “a way of being a kind of explorer, but in modern times,” she said.

She went on to win a MacArthur Fellowship and become a professor at Pennsylvania State University and then the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Whenever she talked to people about her work, they’d ask the same thing: “whether this means we’re bringing extinct species back to life.”

Shapiro admitted she was “initially pretty reluctant to accept this idea of de-extinction.” But the thought, of course, crossed her mind. She taught a graduate seminar at Santa Cruz on de-extinction to explore the idea and published a book called “How to Clone a Mammoth” in 2015.

Her book’s title promises a how-to manual, but inside she comes to what she called a “positive yet skeptical” conclusion: Though high-tech biology may benefit existing species, cloning a mammoth is technologically impossible, in large part because no one has ever found viable mammoth cells frozen in ice.

And even if an extinct animal could be brought back, she thought, it’d be returning to an altered environment where it may not thrive. “There is no point in bringing the dodo back,” Shapiro told the Wall Street Journal a few years after publishing her book. “Their eggs will be eaten the same way that made them go extinct the first time.”

“She was probably the biggest critic” of de-extinction, Froese said.

Her thinking began to shift while writing the book and after meeting Harvard geneticist George Church.

His idea wasn’t to clone mammoths per se, but to tweak the genome of its closest relative, the Asian elephant. By using the latest gene-editing tools, including CRISPR, to make changes to the DNA code linked to tusk size and shape, woolly hair and other adaptations to the cold, geneticists could create something mammoth-like.

“I’d been thinking about it wrong,” she said. No, scientists will never clone a genetic copy of an extinct mammoth, like scientists have done with Dolly the sheep. “But that’s not how it would happen.”

When Church and Ben Lamm, a tech entrepreneur, launched Colossal in 2021, Shapiro was still leery, saying at the time that “there’s tons of trouble everyone is going to encounter along the way.”

Lamm made a point of winning over the doubters by explaining the company’s goals. “It’s not our job to persuade anyone that what we’re doing is a good idea or bad idea. It’s just our job to be transparent and educate,” he said. Trying to bring Shapiro aboard was a no-brainer. “Beth is arguably the top ancient DNA researcher,” Lamm said.

Like for many, the coronavirus pandemic proved to be a turning point in Shapiro’s career.

A number of personal changes piled up — a breast cancer scare, her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the murder of her close cousin, raising her first- and fourth-graders while they attended school on Zoom for more than a year. The upheaval prompted her to reflect on how she spends her time.

In quiet moments, she began asking herself and her husband, Richard E. Green, also a professor at UC-Santa Cruz, “Am I using every minute of my day and the talents that I have and the reach that I have to do the most that I can?”

De-extinction?
At Colossal’s gleaming white lab in Dallas, Shapiro watched as one of the company’s scientists, Anna Keyte, probed an egg of one of the dodo’s closest living relatives, a common pigeon.

Working at one of the lab’s benches, Keyte gingerly inserted a needle into the shell, sucking out a bit of the egg white to make room for a dime-sized window she then cut into the top of the egg with a tiny pair of scissors.

The hole revealed a web of red vessels embedded in the yolk. Keyte maneuvered another needle into the thump-thumping at its center and drew out a sliver of blood to extract the key to de-extincting the dodo: primordial germ cells.

In the embryos of birds, humans and many other organisms, primordial germ cells are the ones destined to become sperm or egg cells in adults. Colossal plans to extract and edit these cells, using a living pigeon’s DNA as a canvass and dabbing the genes of the dodo into it. After that, Shapiro’s team plans to inject the edited cells into the circulating blood of a developing embryo.

The bird that hatches from that egg will be a regular pigeon, but with one key difference: Its reproductive organs will contain dodo DNA. If all goes according to plan, that bird’s offspring, in turn, will be a dodo.

Or at least, it will be a close copy. “We’re not trying to make something that’s identical to a dodo,” Shapiro said. “We’re trying to create something that’s able to behave like a dodo would on that landscape in some key, functional way. So a large, flightless bird that wanders around and eats fruits and spreads the seeds.”

In addition to the dodo, Colossal aims to bring back the woolly mammoth and a carnivorous marsupial called the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Apologies to “Jurassic Park” fans, but the Tyrannosaurus rex is not happening, she said.

“When you say de-extinction to the average person, they immediately think ‘Jurassic Park,’” Shapiro said. But the DNA of dinosaurs that died tens of millions of years ago has degraded too far to be stitched back together.

When Colossal launched, it faced many critics in addition to Shapiro with lots of questions: Would de-extinct animals displace modern ones? Could people safely live alongside revived beasts as big as a mammoth? And couldn’t the money be better spent on saving endangered species that are still around?

“Species that have been extinct for thousands of years, to think that you can re-create that ecosystem in today’s world?” said Rubenstein, one of Shapiro’s old collaborators. “I’m not a big fan of that.”

But if anyone can do it right, he added, it’s Shapiro. “Because she’s careful, because she cares about evolutionary history, she’s a good person to be at the helm of this project.”

For Shapiro, doing the dodo justice means making sure it has a home to go to. Last year, she took a trip with one of her sons to Mauritius. Officials there eased her earlier concerns about a lack of habitat for the bird after showing her fenced-off areas where dodos could roam in the future. “They actually have some really advanced conservation work that’s going on to try to restore native habitats,” she said.

Shapiro aims to use gene editing and other Colossal tech to help extinct animals’ living cousins. The company wants to fix “deleterious mutations” in endangered pink pigeons, which suffer from inbreeding, with DNA from museum specimens. Piggybacking on its mammoth work, her team also wants to make a vaccine for a herpes virus that kills elephants.

Shapiro’s evolution on the idea of de-extinction involved “coming to grips with how transformative this technology will be” for living species, she said. She said her new salary is on par with that at her university job. “I guess I swapped tenure for stock options,” she said.

The company plans to make money not with zoo-style exhibits but by selling its technologies as well as credits for conserving biodiversity and sequestering carbon. It hopes future mammoth herds will restore grasslands that will store the climate-warming carbon.

Shapiro is ready to embrace the mammoth in a new way, too.

“I had always wanted a tattoo but could never commit,” she said, referring to the dodo inking on her arm. “One of my best friends is fully covered in tattoos and finally convinced me.”

After putting on her coat at Colossal’s lab, she whirled her thumbs over her head to point to a spot on her back where she could add an image of a mammoth. “I have to keep them at the same size ratio.”

This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.