The Dodo Is Getting a Hollywood Glow-Up, And the A-List Is Footing the Bill

Colossal Biosciences’ new AI platform is studying bird faces to recreate history’s most famous flightless icon, with Peter Jackson, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton cheering from the front row.

Every great comeback starts with a makeover. The dodo, the bird the world wrote off as a punchline more than 300 years ago, is getting one of the most ambitious ones in history. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas de-extinction company behind dire wolf pups Romulus and Remus, just unveiled GenoMorph, an AI platform built to recapture the dodo’s unmistakable look. First up? That famously oversized, hooked beak, the feature that made the dodo a legend.

Think of GenoMorph as the ultimate glam squad. Instead of working from one faded portrait, it studied the faces of more than 70 living bird species and CT-scanned skulls mapped at 541 points. Also, chicken, quail, duck and pigeon embryos across six stages of development. From all that, it flagged roughly 2,300 genetic “switches” that may shape the size and structure of a beak. “De-extinction is as much a data problem as a biology problem,” said Colossal CEO Ben Lamm.

But here’s what makes this bigger than one bird’s signature look. Only a handful of dodo genomes survive, which would hinder most labs to stop their work, there’s simply no family album to compare against. GenoMorph gets around that by learning from the living. This is an approach Colossal says could help any extinct or endangered bird with a thin genetic record. And the real-world pieces are falling into place. The company’s Texas flock of Nicobar pigeons, the dodo’s closest living relative, has grown to 36 birds, and their eggs have already yielded the cells needed to pass edits down to future generations. The team has even hatched its first chimeric chickens and built tiny fat-bubble couriers that slip gene-editing tools into developing embryos.

No wonder the A-list is paying attention. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh put $10 million into Colossal, and the company’s famous backers also include Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Paris Hilton, Chris Hemsworth, Sophie Turner and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. A lineup that could pack any red carpet. For centuries, “dead as a dodo” has been the last word on gone forever. Now, with an AI that has an eye for faces and some very famous friends in its corner, the dodo is finally getting ready for its close-up.