Director Peter Jackson has given $10m to a startup aiming to revive extinct animals. Did he learn nothing from Jurassic Park?

The dodo is dead. That’s kind of its claim to fame. Had a bit of an awkward-looking beak. Couldn’t fly. Poor relation to the pigeon. Generally mediocre all around, really. But it did manage to waddle its way into the history books due to an unfortunate extinction event.

Like a rather clumsy phoenix, however, the dodo may rise again. In 2023, Colossal Biosciences, a gene-editing company that had already made headlines for its plans to revive the woolly mammoth, announced it was trying to bring the dodo “back to life”. At the time, Beth Shapiro, the lead palaeogeneticist at the Texas-based startup, told the Guardian that she had been fascinated by the dodo ever since she saw a preserved specimen in an Oxford museum in 1999, and tried to persuade the museum to let her extract its DNA. Which was certainly enterprising of her.