Once flocks dwindled to the thousands, these sociable birds-which practiced communal breeding and roosting-stopped reproducing and were driven to extinction in a shockingly short span of time. But intensive hunting and habitat destruction by humans drove this species to a threshold from which they could not recover. Flocks of passenger pigeons contained millions of birds darkened swaths of sky up to a mile wide. In the early 1800s, the passenger pigeon was the world’s most abundant bird species, even though its range was limited to eastern and central North America. The first candidate for “de-extinction”: the iconic passenger pigeon ( Ectopistes migratorius). As vast stretches of hardwood forests were cleared in America’s westward expansion, the birds lost much of their. In hindsight, the path to extinction was not altogether surprising. Ectopistes means 'moving about or wandering,' and migratorius means 'migrating. A messenger pigeon on a house roof A group of homing pigeons in flight A modern day racing pigeon wearing an electronic timing ring. A group of scientists in Sausalito, California, are working on bringing back the passenger pigeon as part of a larger effort to enhance. Its scientific name is Ectopistes migratorius. Credit a new field of science called de-extinction biology. Dinosaurs have been gone far too long for DNA to still exist, but animals that went extinct during human history could potentially make a comeback. The species disappeared altogether 100 years ago with the death of Martha, the last known Passenger Pigeon, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The passenger pigeons or wild pigeon belongs to the order Columbiformes. Can scientists pull off a real-life version of Jurassic Park? This intriguing question received a lot of attention earlier this year, when Revive & Restore (a project of the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation) announced their goal of reviving extinct species using cutting-edge DNA technology.
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