Post by @colossal

Every picture you’ve ever seen of a dodo is probably wrong. The chunky, goofy bird from Alice in Wonderland, cartoons, memes, and museum gift shops mostly come from a single painting that helped shape the world’s image of the dodo for centuries. And it wasn’t very accurate. But while Europe was falling in love with this famously inaccurate version of the bird, painted by a man who had only ever seen a very overstuffed dodo, other artists, working under different constraints, were painting something very different. In this film, we follow art historian Marine Saussier as she traces the dodo through centuries of paintings, royal collections, Mughal courts, and forgotten artworks to uncover what the most famous depictions of the dodo got wrong, and which paintings may offer the best clues to what the bird truly looked like. That information is invaluable to the scientists at Colossal Biosciences working to bring the dodo back. Alongside ancient DNA, genomics, computational biology, and a whole suite of other sciences, de-extinction requires something surprisingly simple: knowing what the animal actually looked like. That’s why Marine is sharing her research with Colossal’s scientists, helping answer questions about the bird’s true morphology and more. Because bringing back the dodo isn’t just about ancient DNA. This is the story of the art that created the myth of the dodo, the art helping uncover the truth, and the science working to bring the bird back from extinction.