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Cloning is a great idea, but I think we also need to work a bit on our fundamental relationship with the other life forms, minerals and fellow humans. For example: Man clones pigeons from old DNA. Pigeons crap all over everything. Man eradicates pigeons again along with wolves, coyotes, beers, cloned sabre tooth tigers, etc.

Things are changing though, so hopefully we can restore some balance and improve conservation.

Pigeons are crapping all over everything now. What harm would one more species do? No big loss for "beers" :-D

I guess I've got beers on the brain. Oh well, it's Friday, lol. :D

In all seriousness. We have wiped out thousands of species of animals and justify it but quoting Darwin in "survival of the fittest". Darwin was referring to the natural order of things. Man's interference is not the natural order of things.

Good point! Actually there are many examples of cooperation in nature as well. Some herd animals work together and take votes to figure out where the herd will roam. The natural order of things is difficult to see sometimes - our success depends heavily on our ability to communicate and cooperate together. I believe a greater shift towards cooperation and away from the scarcity driven mentality of "survival of the fittest" will help end the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet that we are currently experiencing.

I don't think it would be possible with this species, at least not with our current technology. The DNA in the stuffed animals are probably degraded, and unusable for cloning purposes.

The reason as to why some scientists are trying to clone mammoths and animals from the ice age is because they have been frozen, so their DNA degrades a lot slower. I sadly don't think anyone have any frozen Passenger Pigeons laying in their freezer (and the DNA would probably have been degraded even if stored properly, which is also the reason why they have so much trouble with cloning mammoths).

DNA takes thousands of years to erode. That's why mammoths are so hard. They died off that long ago. Feathers should still have sufficient DNA . That's why cloning dodos is on the discussion table.

Yea, seems you are right. I was just checking it out, and it seems like both the feathers and the bones from the Passenger Pigeon have enough DNA to sequence and possibly clone it.