![]() They compared the passenger pigeons' DNA to that of its closest living relatives, band-tailed pigeons, which live across the west coast of North America. "And from that," Shapiro says, "we were able to generate the entire genome sequence from several of these different birds." All the team needed was a tiny piece of skin from the bottom of one of the pigeon's toes. ![]() Museums have many other passenger pigeons besides Martha in their collections, and the researchers recently persuaded curators to let them take tissue samples from scores of the birds. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News/Wikimedia Commons The artwork titled Shooting Wild Pigeons in Northern Louisiana is based on a sketch by Smith Bennett and appeared in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of July 3, 1875. Her body got frozen inside a 300-pound block of ice and shipped by train to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where tourists can see her stuffed body on display in a glass case. The last known passenger pigeon, Martha, lived at the Cincinnati Zoo until her death in 1914. These awesome congregations also made the birds easy to hunt, and their numbers started to decline rapidly in the late 19 th century. "There are crazy historic records about this thing blocking out the daytime sky for hours at a time," Shapiro says. "We were hoping that we could get to the bottom of why they went extinct so quickly - why it was that this giant population of birds suddenly became extinct, entirely extinct, over the course of just a couple of decades," explains Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the researchers on a newly released study in the journal Science.īillions of passenger pigeons once flew over North America, flocking together in huge clouds of birds. Scientists believe they may have new insights into why passenger pigeons went extinct, after analyzing DNA from the toes of birds that have been carefully preserved in museums for over a century. Her preserved body is now on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Instructor: Dr.Martha (right), the last known passenger pigeon, died in 1914. After the trade of the pigeons had been commercialized by the late 1800s, their population diminished significantly until the last known bird died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.Ĭourse: Modern Global Environmental History Beginning in the eighteenth century, commercial hunters began shooting pigeons or using nets to capture them to sell them for meat or as live targets for trap hunting. Because the pigeons flew in such large flocks, sometimes hundreds of miles long with billions of birds, many could be easily captured at one time. Prior to colonization Native Americans ate the passenger pigeon without harming their continued existence, but the massive commercial consumption of pigeon meat in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century led to its demise. Deforestation after the European colonization contributed to the bird’s extinction. The passenger pigeon, once one of the most abundant birds in the world, was pushed to extinction by overhunting and habitat destruction in 1914 when the world’s last passenger pigeon died.
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