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Questions about the lives of extinct birds now perched in natural history museums have persisted long after their passing: What did they sound like? What did they look like in flight? What ecological niche did they inhabit?
While efforts are underway to bring back extinct mammals, such as the woolly mammoth and quagga, through cloning, artificial insemination, and a breeding process that aims to revert domesticated species to phenotypes that closely resemble their wild ancestors, birds’ reproductive systems are not as amenable to these techniques.
So scientists are turning to cultured germ cell transmission, a promising technique that has been used to propagate gene-edited domesticated chickens for more than a decade. The idea is that genes from extinct birds could be replicated and introduced into host embryos’ germlines.
We’re starting from a place where there is at least a viable technology, and then we’re stepping out ...
