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https://theconversation.com/first-the-dire-wolf-now-nzs-giant-moa-why-real-de-extinction-is-unlikely-to-fly-260797>
"The announcement that New Zealand’s moa nunui (giant moa) is the next
“de-extinction” target for Colossal Biosciences, in partnership with Canterbury
Museum, the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre and filmmaker Peter Jackson, caused
widespread alarm among scientists.
This follows the US company’s recreation of a “dire wolf”, which was
essentially a genetically engineered grey wolf. But that project was probably
easy compared to the latest plan to resurrect the moa.
I think it’s a pipe dream and there are several reasons why.
Firstly, birds are harder to “de-extinct” than placental mammals. One would
need a surrogate egg to bring chicks to term, and for many moa species there
are no eggs from living birds big enough to house a developing chick. In this
case, artificial eggs would need to be developed.
Then there is evolutionary history. From my own work and the research of
others, we know the moa is most closely related to the tinamou, a small flying
bird in South America.
To get to the common ancestor of the moa and tinamou, you’d have to go back
some 60 million years of evolution. That’s a lot of time for mutations to
evolve in genes controlling how moa look, that would need to be re-engineered
to bring back moa traits.
Help us share expert knowledge.
The evolutionary history of the palaeognath group is even deeper. Formerly
known as ratites, this group includes the tinamou and lineages of living
flightless birds (emu, kiwi, cassowary, rhea, ostrich) and extinct ones (New
Zealand’s moa and Madagascar’s elephant birds).
Genetically engineering a tinamou or any other birds in this group to create a
moa hybrid would be challenging given this deep evolutionary timescale –
certainly much harder than genetically engineering a grey wolf. And in any
case, this would not recreate a moa, but merely something that may look like a
moa. As one critic put it, it would not have the mauri (life force) of a moa.
There are no living analogues of moa within the palaeongath group. We don’t
know whether birds created through de-extinction methods would function like a
moa in the ecosystem.
Moa are unique, even among other flightless birds, in that they had no wings –
all other flightless birds still have remnant wings. As a start, any genetic
engineering would need to target regions of the genome that control the
expression of genes for wing formation. This could have unintended
consequences."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
