Scientists at Harvard University have assembled the first nearly complete genome of the little bush moa, a flightless bird that went extinct soon after Polynesians settled New Zealand in the late 13th century. The achievement moves the field of extinct genomes closer to the goal of “de-extinction”—bringing vanished species back to life by slipping the genome into the egg of a living species, “Jurassic Park”-like.
“De-extinction probability increases with every improvement in ancient DNA analysis,” said Stewart Brand, co-founder of the nonprofit conservation group Revive and Restore, which aims to resurrect vanished species including the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth, whose genomes have already been mostly pieced together.
For the moa, whose DNA was reconstructed from the toe bone of a museum specimen, that might require a little more genetic tinkering and a lot of egg: The 6-inch long, 1-pounder that emus lay might be just the ticket.
The work on the little bush moa has yet to be published in a journal (the researchers posted a non-peer-reviewed paper on a public site), but colleagues in the small world of extinct genomes sang its praises. Morten Erik Allentoft of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, an expert on moa DNA and other extinct genomes, called it “a significant step forward.” Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led a 2017 study reconstructing the genome of the passenger pigeon, called it “super cool” because it “gives us an extinct genome on an evolutionary branch where we hadn’t had any before.”
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