As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that.

If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you.

Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here.

A shower uses less water on average than a bath 80 litres for a shower compared to 150 litres for a bath.

So there's genes for the short tail in the band tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach colored breast, flocking, and so on.

And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet.

Goes off during the day and does normal pigeon stuff. Comes back, the whole place is covered with scaffolding and green netting and there's no way this pigeon can get home.

Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends.

So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro.