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WASHINGTON, D.C.—A bird that once darkened the skies of the 19th-century U.S. no longer exists, except as well-preserved museum specimens bearing bits of DNA. An ambitious new effort aims to use the latest techniques of genetic manipulation to bring the passenger pigeon back, as North Dakotan Ben Novak, a would-be de-extinction scientist working on the Revive & Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, told the crowd at the TEDxDeExtinction event here on March 15.

"This [pigeon flock] was a biological storm that was rejuvenating resources and allowing other animals to thrive," Novak said of the storms of Ectopistes migratorius feces that used to fall like rain on the landscape of eastern North America. Plus, with the regrowth of forest on the east coast "there is more passenger pigeon habitat every year."

But if a bird looks like an extinct passenger pigeon, has some of the genetic code of the passenger pigeon, but does not act like a passenger pigeon because it is raised by other breeds and few in number: is it a true passenger pigeon? That is just one of the questions posed by the idea of de-extinction—deliberately resurrecting species killed off by human activity or inactivity. And that question may just challenge one of the fundamental concepts of biology: what determines a distinct species.
Much more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lost-species-revived-
from-dna-and-restored-to-nature]
At least someone is asking a pertinent question:

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Will We Kill Off Today's Animals If We Revive Extinct Ones?

De-extinction hopes to revive mammoths, gastric frogs and other missing species, but it might undermine the conservation of creatures that still survive.

The rebirth of an extinct frog species may come from the freezer, not the stomach. The gastric brooding frog, when it existed on Earth, swallowed its eggs, transformed its stomach into a womb and vomited up its young once sufficiently grown. But the frog disappeared from the mountains of southern Australia shortly after it was discovered in the 1970s, persisting only as a few frozen specimens in the bottom of a scientist's freezer.

The cells in those tissues should have been ruptured by the swelling ice crystals that formed within and around them. But some of the cells remained reasonably intact, according to paleontologist Michael Archer of the University of New South Wales in Australia, who is attempting to resurrect the species via his Lazarus Project. He and his colleagues transplanted the nucleus of that cell and others like it into hundreds of eggs from a closely related species. "Last February we saw a miracle starting to happen," Archer announced for the first time to the crowd at the TEDx De-Extinction event on March 15 at the National Geographic Auditorium. "One of them began to divide." (Archer’s group has not published the work yet.)

While tadpoles may be a long way off, let alone a viable frog, the southern gastric brooding frog might be the first species brought back from the dead permanently. The first de-extinction happened in 2003, although it lasted all too briefly. Scientists coaxed a clone of an extinct ibex from Spain to birth from a special hybrid goat. But the cloned bucardo bore a third lung and couldn't breathe properly, dying within 10 minutes.

Although this early effort failed, the growing cohort of resurrection projects raises a central question: Does extinction mean forever, anymore? If not, do we have an obligation to bring species back? "If it's clear that we exterminated these species, we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it but a moral imperative to do something if we can," Archer argued. The new science of synthetic biology aims to make it possible for him to fulfill that moral imperative.

Humans have killed off many species, both iconic and common. A lighthouse keeper's cat Tibbles—aided by a few feral cats perhaps—caught and killed nearly every single Stephens Island wren just as they were discovered by science in 1900. Hungry sailors ate the Steller's sea cow to death within a century of its discovery. The Xerces Blue butterfly disappeared with the sand dunes from San Francisco in the 1940s as that city swelled. The American chestnut, once the most abundant tree in eastern North America, succumbed to a fungal blight imported from Asia by humans.

"As a human species, we have been amazingly efficient at making things extinct," noted conservation scientist Kate Jones of University College London at the TEDx DeExtinction event.

As the extinction rate swells thanks to habitat loss, over-hunting and human-induced climate change, the world may be on pace to lose half of all species by the end of this century—a reality dubbed the sixth extinction because it would represent the sixth mass die-off of life in Earth's history. Of course, the other five were caused by climatic, planetary or astronomic events.

Just as mammoth DNA has waited in the Siberian tundra, preserved by constant cold temperatures, the cold of the San Diego's frozen zoo may be the key to ensuring that today's biodiversity makes it through the next few centuries of the Anthropocene intact. This ark, maintained at a steady -197 degrees Celsius, holds the cells of 503 mammals, 170 birds, 70 reptiles and 12 amphibians and fish—out of an estimated 10 million animal, plant, microbe and fungal species on the planet. The collection displays a bias toward charismatic megafauna and thus against the uncharismatic microfauna that keep the planet alive. The cold Svalbard seed vault in Norway performs the same function for crops—species that, despite their importance to us, have dwindled in biodiversity as genetic engineering has created specialized variants that now dominate the landscape.

Some conservationists also pour cold water on the very idea of de-extinction, worrying that it could enable the extinction of yet more species by diverting funds from proven efforts to sustain them, such as protected areas, intensive management of small surviving populations, even advertising campaigns to reduce the consumption of endangered species. We might bring the mammoth back while letting its relatives slip away. "At this moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect forest elephants from armed poachers," noted biologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University at TEDx. "And we're talking in this safe auditorium about bringing back the woolly mammoth?"Much more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=de-extinction-to-brin
g-back-extinct-species-but-challenges-conservation

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It's a conundrum...