Bringing back a long extinct bird

Scott V. Edwards, professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and MCZ's curator of ornithology, is the senior author of the published genome of the little bush moa, an extinct, flightless bird.  “We can study modern birds by looking at them and their behavior. With extinct species, we have very little information except what their bones looked like and in some cases what they ate. DNA provides a really exciting window into the natural history of extinct species like the little bush moa.” 

The research is published in Science Advances, A nuclear genome assembly of an extinct flightless bird, the little bush moa and featured in the Harvard Gazette, Bringing back a long extinct bird.