An organization dedicated to the “genetic rescue for endangered and extinct species” thinks it can bring the great auk back from the dead.

Similar in size and appearance to a medium-sized penguin, the great auk went extinct in the mid-19th century due to hundreds of years of game hunting on the British coasts, which only made the marine bird more rare and “valuable.”

Revive & Restore is convinced it can extract DNA from the great auk’s fossils and preserved organs, possibly allowing them to sequence its genome. The organization would then genetically modify and fertilize an embryo of the great auk’s nearest relative, the razorbill. Scientists would then implant it into a large bird that could potentially hatch a great auk, according to The Telegraph.

A razorbill, the closest living relative to the great auk.

This new biological discipline, called “de-extinction,” is being given credence as a revival technique thanks to discussions like the one surrounding this flightless seabird and organizations like Revive & Restore.

The organization has a list of candidate species, both extinct and endangered, that they could “de-extinct” or genetically assist in the wild and a checklist to show what they would do for each of these species.

The organization must be cautious, though. Introducing a new species, even though it may have existed there before, could potentially be dangerous to the rest of the ecosystem. Revive & Restore’s mission is to “enhance biodiversity” by essentially cloning and redistributing these species back into the wild, but they must do so carefully.

The organization could run the revived species back into extinction, or it could replace and destroy another population of animals that has taken over for the original species in the ecosystem. It would be incredibly difficult to predict how a wooly mammoth — one of Revive & Restore’s loftiest candidates for “de-extinction” — fits into today’s world, and the same goes for all other species on their lists.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science. 

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John Oliver's latest "Last Week Tonight" web exclusive on Sunday featured one of his signature, heated tirades against a peculiar target: birds and their migratory patterns.

"As the weather cools down, birds are going to start their seasonal migration, which is of course when they travel to warmer climates in order to feed, grow, and mate," Oliver said. "It's their version of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' except birds are too dumb to realize that everything they needed was inside them the whole time."

Oliver then proceeded to lay down a harsh mock-rant against the avian species as it prepares for migration.

"I have a brief message for the birds of the Northeast as they begin their journey southward. Are you listening birds? Here it goes: F--- you, birds!"

Calling birds a "sh--ty sequel to the dinosaurs," the "Last Week Tonight" host went on to accost parrots, ostriches, and (most pointedly) geese: "Yes, I'm talking to you, geese. You look like ducks that played football in high school and never stopped going to the gym."

The reason behind Oliver's takedown of all winged creatures seems to lie in his deep-seated resentment of birds' ability to escape the impending cold weather, as he prepares to face the winter months in New York City, where "Last Week Tonight" is filmed.

"I hope all you disgusting sky mice enjoy your tropical getaways while the rest of us face the frigid torment of winter. And I hope each and every one of you flies into a wind turbine on your way north next spring."

HBO's "Last Week Tonight" returns from summer hiatus on September 25. 

Watch the segment below:

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Birds always seem to avoid one another, even if they're flying on what looks like a collision course.

In a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, researchers from the University of Queensland decided to look into how this happens. 

Their rationale was that birds must've evolved over millions of years to have these skills, and it's possible that we could learn a thing or two about how to avoid possible aircraft collisions. Humans are much newer to flight, after all.

The researchers looked at 10 birds, specifically parakeets or "budgies." They set the birds up on opposite ends of a tunnel and went through 102 rounds of flights.

They then found out that of the 102 flights, none resulted in crashes.

What's more, the birds tended to avoid any head-on collisions by always turning right, or in some cases changing altitude so that they weren't on the same level. 

Here's an example of a collision being avoided: 

"As air traffic becomes increasing busy, there is a pressing need for robust automatic systems for manned and unmanned aircraft, so there are real lessons to be learned from nature," study author Mandyam Srinivasan said in a news release.

It's a pretty simple takeaway, but the researchers think the "to the right" rule, along with guidelines related to changing altitude could be useful for unmanned aircrafts and autopilot systems. 

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It was the low, hissing sound of static, like what you might hear if you tuned your radio between stations. The year was 1963, and all Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, a pair of radio astronomers at Bell Laboratories, wanted to measure was the minimum brightness of the sky. But this low, hissing static was getting in the way.

The static signaled the existence of extra radiation. But for the life of them, Wilson and Penzias couldn’t figure out where on Earth this radiation was coming from.

According to Smithsonian, the pair had ruled out radio noise from nearby cities, after-effects of nuclear detonations, and signals from the Van Allen belts, the huddles of charged particles loitering around by Earth’s magnetic field.

“I had a lot of experience fixing practical problems in radio telescopes,” Robert Wilson told Smithsonian. “We looked for anything in the instrument or in the environment that might be causing the excess antenna noise. Among things, we searched for radiation from the walls of the antenna, especially the throat, which is the small end of the horn. We constructed a whole new throat section and then tested the instrument with it.”

Feathered squatters

And then they noticed them. A pair of pigeons living inside their radio antenna, recklessly splattering the expensive instrument with their gooey bird droppings. Wilson and Penzias wondered if these feathered squatters might somehow be causing that annoying static.

So the scientists went out and got a Havahart trap and jailed the unsuspecting pigeons inside so they could send them far, far away.

“We took the pigeons, put them in a box, and mailed them as far away as we could in the company mail to a guy who fancied pigeons,” Wilson said in an Aeon video. “He looked at them and said these are junk pigeons and let them go and before long they were right back.”

But in the meantime, Wilson and Penzias had ruled out the pigeons as a source for the strange signal. Even with the pigeons gone, the static was still there.

The afterglow of the big bang

This clued them in that the noise wasn’t coming from Earth at all, or even from inside the galaxy. “We were really running out of ideas when we heard about the idea of radiation left over from the big bang,” Wilson said in the Aeon video.

Around that time Robert Dicke, a physicist at Princeton, was piecing together a theory that stated that if the universe was truly created in the big bang, “the residue of the explosion would now be a low level background radiation spread evenly throughout the universe,” Futurism writes.

Dicke was talking about something called the cosmic microwave background, which is the faint afterglow of the big bang, a whisper from the formation of the universe, an echo of the universe’s first baby cries.

Back in the days of analog television and radio, you could see this afterglow in a small fraction of the snowy static between channels and hear it in the hisses that filled the spaces between radio programs.

And it was this cosmic microwave background radiation that was clouding their experiment. It was the very first confirmation of the big bang.

In 1978, Wilson and Penzias received the Nobel Prize in physics for their accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.

“We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” Wilson told Smithsonian. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. This was really the start of modern cosmology.”

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When software engineer Kurt Grandis wanted to free his bird feeder from the 'hoard of squirrels' plaguing his backyard, he turned to his machine learning degree. By designing a program to watch for anything squirrel shaped, and installing a water gun on a rotating turret, he was able to create a machine that recognized squirrels and soaked them from afar. Watch how they reacted next in this short animation for Marketplace and Tech Insider's Codebreaker podcast. Then, listen to the whole episode here about decisive machines. 

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This kinetic sculpture has been created to mimic the flight of a flock of birds.

It is displayed in a sunlit atrium in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was designed by artist studio Soso Limited in partnership with Plebian Design and Hypersonic.

The piece is made up of 400 elements which can independently open and close.

Produced by Leon Siciliano

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A new bird-like dinosaur was just discovered in south China. The specimen was uncovered in the Ganzhou area, during construction work at a school, and it narrowly missed being destroyed by a dynamite explosion.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and China carried out a study to identify it.

It belongs to a group called the oviraptorosaurs — funny-looking feathered dinosaurs with sharp beaks which were ancestors of birds. 

The team named the species Tongtianlong limosus, which roughly translates as "muddy dragon on the road to heaven," or so it's been nicknamed, "mud dragon."

The findings were published in the journal Nature, which describes what the strange creature probably would have looked like. It had feathers and a beak-like a bird, but it was flightless. It was also the size of a donkey. 

The researchers speculate that during the time Tongtianlong limosus was walking the earth, dinosaurs were experiencing a population boost and diversifying into new species. This group was probably one of the largest groups of dinosaurs to do so before the assumed asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which killed all non-bird dinosaurs.

"This new dinosaur is one of the most beautiful, but saddest, fossils I’ve ever seen,"Dr Steve Brusatte, a professor of geoscience and one of the researchers at the University of Edinburgh that studied the fossil, said in a statement. "But we’re lucky that the ‘Mud Dragon’ got stuck in the muck, because its skeleton is one of the best examples of a dinosaur that was flourishing during those final few million years before the asteroid came down and changed the world in an instant."

The Tongtianlong limosus was found almost completely intact, lying on its front with its wings and neck outstretched. The scientists think that the creature died in this pose after being buried in mud about 66-72 million years ago.

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A 41-year-old conservationist has become the first woman to cross the English Channel using a motorized paraglider, in an effort to learn more about bird migration.

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A new type of large, prehistoric bird has just been unearthed in the Canadian arctic.

A team of geologists from the University of Rochester discovered the new species, which is approximately 90 million years old, and published their findings this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The discovery places the bird among the oldest avian records ever found in the Northern hemisphere.

The bones of the bird, named Tingmiatornis arctica, show that it probably looked a bit like a cross between a large seagull and a cormorant, a large equatic bird, and was likely a similar size with a wingspan of over a meter.

The name of the genus Tingmiatornis loosely translates to "those that fly" from the word " Tingmiat" in the Inuktitut language, which is spoken in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic. Tingmiatornis arctica also had sharp teeth and features that allowed it to dive.

Along with other fossils from previous expeditions, the new bird helps paint a clearer picture of the ecosystem that would have existed some 93.9 to 89.8 million years ago in the Canadian Arctic. It could also provide further evidence of the intense global warming that scientists think may have taken place over that time — and even help us paint a clearer picture of the future of climate change.

How climate records can help us prepare for the future

Building historic climate records helps scientists determine how different species and ecosystems are affected by climate change. The way different species are distributed around countries can help predict the effects too.

"Before our fossil, people were suggesting that it was warm, but you still would have had seasonal ice," said John Tarduno, the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Rochester and the leading scientist on the expedition, in a statement. "We're suggesting that's not even the case, and that it's one of these hyper-warm intervals because the bird's food sources and the whole part of the ecosystem could not have survived in ice."

By looking at fossil and sediment records, the team determined that Tingmiatornis arctica would have lived in a volcanic environment which would have been busy with turtles, champsosaurs and crocodile-like reptiles. This is very different to the Arctic temperatures you find there now.

'What that world could look like, a world without ice at the arctic'

"The fossils tell us what that world could look like, a world without ice at the arctic," said Richard Bono, another member of the team who is a PhD candidate in earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester.

Tingmiatornis arctica fossils were found above lava fields, which would have formed from a series of volcanic eruptions. When these volcanoes pumped carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere, it caused a greenhouse effect, which allowed large birds like Tingmiatornis arctica to thrive.

The environmental clues are the biggest indicators the team has to explain why the bird was found where it was.

"It's there because everything is right," Tarduno said. "The food supply was there, there was a freshwater environment, and the climate became so warm that all of the background ecological factors were established to make it a great place."

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NOW WATCH: Scientists uncovered a bloody, feathered dinosaur tail that got stuck in tree sap 99 million years ago

Approximately 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid or comet smashed into the Earth near what we now think of as the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. On the other side of the world, in India, at a place called the Deccan Traps, a period of intense volcanic eruption began — one that would last tens of thousands of years.

These catastrophic and powerful events are often considered the primary causes of the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period that wiped out most of the dinosaurs along with 75% of life on the globe.

But brand-new research reveals another factor that may have played a role in ending the era of the most massive creatures to ever walk the surface of the planet. It seems dinosaur eggs took a particularly long time to hatch. That means that when they had to compete for sparse resources in a post-extinction event world with the more efficient amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals that made it through that era into the next one, dinosaurs may have lost out.

Compared to reptiles, birds lay few eggs, and they are particularly large. This could hamper their competitiveness, since it exposes them to destructive risks. But bird eggs hatch about twice as fast as reptiles (their behavior keeps eggs warm and stable), which researchers think helps enough survive to hatch. Dinosaurs still exist in the form of birds — avian dinosaurs — and so researchers thought that the eggs of the non-avian varieties would still hatch at about the same fast rate as bird eggs do. After all, from what we can tell, non-avian dinosaur and bird eggs have similar structures and birds are the only remaining dinosaurs for us to base these hypotheses on.

But the new study, published January 2 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that dinosaur eggs took far longer to hatch. For one species studied, researchers estimate that a comparable bird egg would take between 40 and 82 days to hatch. The dinosaur egg, it seems, would have incubated between 83 and 171 days before it was ready, more like a reptile.

And that changes a lot of what we know about dinosaurs.

It's all about the teeth

The amount of time it takes for young to be born has a significant impact on how a species lives. It can define mating season, migratory behavior, and other characteristics.

Dinosaurs had large eggs and, in general, adults expended more energy than comparably sized reptiles or amphibians, putting a limit on their competitiveness.

By studying the growth of embryonic teeth in other species, researchers have been able to determine how long it took for the infants of those species to develop. So the team behind this study, consisting of researchers from Florida State, the University of Calgary, and the American Museum of Natural History, decided to try to calculate embryonic tooth growth in two dinosaur species, Hypacrosaurus stebingeri (a sort of "duck-billed" dinosaur) and Protoceratops andrewsi (a less-famous relative of the Triceratops).

The researchers saw that a certain measure that can be used to calculate embryonic tooth development in both human and crocodilian species exists in dinosaur species as well. So they evaluated fossil teeth from the above species.

Their calculations showed that the Protoceratops egg would have taken more than twice as long to incubate as a comparable bird egg, and would have been just a bit quicker to develop than a similar reptile. The Hypacrosaurus egg would have incubated even longer, needing more time than a similar reptile.

As the study authors write, this means that many hypotheses of dinosaur behavior may need to be re-evaluated. It was thought that perhaps these species made long migrations back and forth from the Arctic between seasons, but long egg incubation periods may have made this impossible. And while these new findings are just based on evaluations of fossils from two species of dinosaur, the authors say they think these long incubation periods would most likely be found in all toothed dinosaurs — though further research could always change that conclusion.

The other big effect this may have had is on the extinction of these creatures. We already believe dinosaurs expended more energy and needed more resources than reptiles or amphibians. They took a long time to mature, unlike many mammals and birds. When the resources of the world were devastated by a changed climate after the asteroid struck and during the period of volcanic activity, it became hard for any large species to survive. Slow hatching rates would have been just another blow to the non-avian dinosaurs. And that may help further explain why none made it through that time.

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The evolution of penguins is a bit of a puzzle for scientists. Did their ancestors fly or were they always confined to land and sea?

More importantly, were they always the size they are now?

Scientists from New Zealand and Senckenberg finally have some answers, thanks to their recent discovery of a fossil belonging to a giant, 150-centimeter long penguin. The fossil dates pack to the Paleocene era approximately 61 million years ago, making it one of the oldest penguin fossils in the world.

According to a new study which the scientists published in the journal The Science of Nature, these newly discovered bones differ significantly from other discoveries of the same age, which means early penguins were probably much more diverse than scientists previously thought. And their evolution likely began much earlier than previous research has suggested — maybe even as early as the dinosaur age, the scientists conclude.

Where this fits in with what we knew about penguins

Some genetic analysis has shown that the Spheniscidae family, which present penguins belong to, evolved from flightless birds that lived 40-100 million years ago. Other scientists believe their earliest ancestors may have been birds that lived during the Cretaceous period 60-65 million years ago and were able to fly. 

"What sets this fossil apart are the obvious differences compared to the previously known penguin remains from this period of geological history," said Dr Gerald Mayr, an ornithologist at Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt and lead author of the study, in a statement. "The leg bones we examined show that during its lifetime, the newly described penguin was significantly larger than its already described relatives."

In other words, penguins reached a giant size quite early in their evolution. This size increase appears to have started soon after they became flightless, according to the paper, with giant species existing for at least 30 million years, from the mid-Paleocene to the late Oligocene period.

The penguin is almost as big as the largest-known penguin fossil which belonged to Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi. Nordenskjoeldi is thought to have lived in Antarctica about 45-33 million years ago, and reached enormous heights of 180 centimeters. For comparison, Emperor penguins are the tallest current living species of penguin, and they grow up to 122 centimeters.

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A flock of birds was captured on camera whirling in the sky above Cambridgeshire.

The phenomenon is called a 'murmuration', starlings do this to keep warm or stay safe from predators.

Produced by Claudia Romeo

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You know that your morning cup of coffee helps you lift off for work each day, but did you know that it has the potential to do the same for birds?

This spring millions of songbirds are once again migrating thousands of miles from their wintering areas in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America to breeding areas in North America.

At least 42 species of these birds — warblers, tanagers, orioles among them — lift off from coffee farms.

Perhaps also like you, these migrants are coffee connoisseurs, but of a different sort. They only like farms where coffee is grown under tall trees, what is referred to in the industry as “shade-grown coffee.” Trees provide critical habitat to birds and other species, including frogs, butterflies, orchids, and mammals.

Many studies confirm that migratory birds can thrive on the shade-coffee farms where they spend roughly half of each year. Though diminutive in size, many of these birds have an impressive ability to remember where the best farms are and return year after year. In research we conducted, for example, my students and I found one cerulean warbler returned to the same farm for five years.

What draws birds back are the benefits of shade-grown coffee—food, water, and cover for safety and warmth—which help them to survive and gain weight over the winter. That extra weight is needed to fuel their arduous migration. The better a bird’s condition when it departs the wintering grounds, the more likely it is to survive migration, secure a territory for nesting and raise offspring.

Survival and reproduction are key to the persistence of any population, and especially critical for the half of migratory species that are declining. Loss and degradation of wintering habitats are important contributors to population declines. So supporting shade-grown coffee also supports the conservation of migratory birds.

And there’s more. Those same shade trees provide numerous other benefits to the environment, called “ecosystem services.” These services range from storing carbon and protecting water quality to providing food to families and reducing the risk of soil erosion and landslides. Shade-grown coffee also requires fewer chemical applications, like fertilizers and pesticides, because trees can provide nutrients and birds can control the numbers of insect pests.

That means lower exposure to chemicals on the farm, in water supplies, and in coffee cups. Plus coffee grown under shade tends to be of better quality and taste, thereby fetching a higher price in the market for farmers already struggling with poverty and making a better tasting cup for consumers. In these ways, shade coffee can be a win–win–win for conservation, communities and consumers.

Yet despite all these positives, most traditional shade coffee farms in Latin America have been converted to low or no-shade systems (called “sun coffee”) over recent decades. Sun coffee farms are reminiscent of an Iowa cornfield—intensively managed row monocultures devoid of trees or other vegetation. Sadly, the scale of conversion has been staggering. Nearly half of all shade coffee farms in Latin America have been turned over to sun coffee.

With many natural forests destroyed long ago, migratory birds have been relying upon shade coffee farms as habitat surrogates in many regions. As shade coffee farms become increasingly difficult to find, many birds will be forced to forgo good habitat, leaving them with poor prospects of surviving migration and successfully breeding.

But as a coffee drinker, you can put your cup of coffee to work for conservation and purchase shade-grown coffee. A growing number of brands offer shade coffee, with the most rigorous environmental standards associated with Smithsonian’s certified Bird Friendly Coffee and, to a lesser extent, Rainforest Alliance.

Choosing shade-grown coffee sends a powerful signal to the coffee industry that sustainability matters. Purchasing shade-grown coffee also creates an economic incentive to use practices that protect the environment and coffee-growing communities.

So as the weather warms and you wake to the morning symphony of returning songbirds, you can happily drink your cup of shade-grown coffee knowing that you played a role in helping those birds come home.

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Scientists have uncovered an incredible specimen in Myanmar that has given us a glimpse of life from 100 million years ago — a piece of amber containing the remarkably preserved remains of an ancient bird hatchling.

Inside the amber, you can make out the head, tail, and neck of the bird, but it's the wings and feet that are the real marvels — the chunk of fossilized tree resin has perfectly preserved the bird's feathers, flesh, and claws, and gives us insight into a doomed group of prehistoric species called the "opposite birds".

"It's the most complete and detailed view we've ever had," one of the team behind the discovery, Ryan McKellar from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told New Scientist.

"Seeing something this complete is amazing. It's just stunning."

The team suspects that the little bird fell into a pool of conifer sap soon after it hatched, and got trapped in the tar-like liquid.

Interestingly enough, despite being such an important part of our understanding of the prehistoric world, scientists still aren't entirely sure of the exact chemistry at play in the amber preservation process.

What we do know is that after animals get stuck in tree resin, it starts to harden, and if you have the right levels of pressure and temperature, it will transform into a semi-fossilized substance called copal.

"The speed of this process varies tremendously depending on the conditions,"Brian Palmer explains for The Washington Post.

"Scientists don't agree on when resin officially becomes copal, or when copal officially becomes amber. Some say that amber must be at least 2 million years old, but that cutoff is arbitrary."

Unfortunately, while it looks almost good as new, sitting in that amber, the bird's flesh will have likely broken down into pure carbon, which means its DNA is probably long gone.

But what we can glean from this specimen is the fact that it was probably a member of the so-called opposite birds, or Enantiornithes— a group of prehistoric birds, thought to have evolved at the same time as the ancestors of modern birds, but for some reason died off with the non-avian dinosaurs.

"In appearance, opposite birds likely resembled modern birds, but they had a socket-and-ball joint in their shoulders where modern birds have a ball-and-socket joint — hence the name,"Michael Le Page reports for New Scientist.

"They also had claws on their wings, and jaws and teeth rather than beaks — but at the time the hatchling lived, the ancestors of modern birds had not yet evolved beaks either.

You can see the rest of the images of the amber below:

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