Passenger pigeon spotted1/19/2024 If we’re willing to create one individual, then through the exact same processes we can produce individuals belonging to completely different genetic families. The amazing thing about this concept is that we can essentially design the population we start with. And when I read its story, it gripped me on a personal level.Ĭan you really get a healthy population from a few museum specimens? Aesthetically I fell in love with that image. Then, coincidentally, I opened up an Audubon book, Speaking for Nature, and there was a picture of a stuffed passenger pigeon. I also learned the dodo was basically a giant pigeon, which got me interested in pigeons. For my eighth-grade science fair I did a research project on the dodo: how much tissue was available, whether you could get the entire genome, how you’d stick the DNA back together, and what technological advances would be necessary. Considerable technical hurdles remain, but if the work takes wing, it could help save living species on the edge of extinction, too. With guidance from leading geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and ornithologists, passenger pigeon expert Ben Novak is heading up the ambitious effort for Revive & Restore. The last survivor blinked out in 1914, but she-or something very like her-could hatch again, by inscribing genetic codes salvaged from museum specimens into the genomes of band-tailed pigeons, the passenger pigeon’s closest living relative. About five billion passenger pigeons inhabited North America’s temperate forests when European settlers arrived and began hunting the birds and destroying their habitat.
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