But Novak says the recipe to keep chicken cells alive doesn’t work for the cells of these two wild birds. Researchers have made advances growing reproductive cells in petri dishes for domestic chickens, which might help us understand more. Unfortunately, because birds lay eggs, scientists can’t rely on in vitro fertilization with them the same way they can with mammals. The closest living relative of the heath hen, which went extinct in the 1930s, is the greater prairie chicken. The passenger pigeon program started in 2012 and involves learning how to use CRISPR to edit genes of band-tailed pigeons, a close living genetic cousin of the passenger pigeons that died out in the beginning of the 20th century. The de-extinction of passenger pigeons and heath hens are the two projects that Revive & Restore is actively working on. (Credit: ChicagoPhotographer/Shutterstock) The panther numbers increased as a result, yet the cats that live there are now genetically different from the original panther population.īelow, explore a few examples of the species that researchers have attempted to bring back from extinction. Read More: Will Woolly Mammoths Ever Make a Comeback?įlorida panthers, on the other hand, never quite went extinct but to bolster the genetic diversity of the dangerously few big cats that remained in the state, wildlife managers introduced cougars from a separate population in Texas. Did aurochs go extinct when humans domesticated them into modern cows, for example, or did the creatures simply change? In other cases, biologists are working with species that were merely extirpated from specific locales - you see, the concept of extinction isn’t always as clear-cut as it may seem. “There are severe limitations to just how far we can take this technology today,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist of Revive & Restore, a nonprofit that harnesses biotechnologies to resurrect extinct species and save endangered ones. Despite what the dinosaur movies depict, however, we don’t yet have the technology to bring back something from scratch (even if we did have the complete genome of an ancient species).
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