Futurist: Here's The Plan To Bring The Passenger Pigeon Back From The Dead

Last March, scientists met at a TEDx conference to discuss which extinct animals would be good candidates to bring back from the dead, called de-extinction.

One year later, futurist and environmentalist Stewart Brand appeared on Tuesday at a Ted conference in Vancouver to present the status of a few de-extinction projects.

At the paleogenomics lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, lab leader Beth Shapiro and a young scientist, Ben Novak, are trying to revive the first passenger pigeon by altering the DNA of the sally band-tailed pigeon, the passenger's closest genetic relative. A flock of band-tailed pigeons, Brand said, "is being groomed to become the first surrogate parents of passenger pigeons."

In another part of the world, Russian scientist Sergey Zimov has created a preserve in Siberia called Pleistocene Park that attempts to restore the type of grassland that existed when woolly mammoths called that place home. Zimov hopes to eventually re-introduce these hairy creatures to the environment.

De-extinction can also be used to save endangered species, Brand said, and to prevent what's called the extinction vortex - when animal populations fall, inbreeding becomes more common and species go extinct by loss of genetic variation. Endangered species like the black-footed ferret could potentially be saved by introducing old genes into current populations, Brand said.

Brand is the founder and former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the co-founder of the Long New Foundation, an institution that supports projects that promote long-term thinking.