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The Passenger Pigeon: A Century of Extinction

Posted by samzenpus on from the coming-soon dept.

An anonymous reader writes On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the first European settlers arrived in North America at least one of every four birds on the continent was a passenger pigeon, making them the most numerous birds in North America, and perhaps in the world. From the article: "But extinction apparently doesn't ring with the finality it used to. Researchers are working to 'de-extinct' the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through some Jurassic Park-like genetic engineering. Instead of using frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of a dinosaur's genetic code as in Michael Crichton's story, the real-life 'bring-back-the-passenger pigeon' researchers are using the bird's closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon.

1 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Happened to Netscape Navigator and IE, too. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This is a lot like what happened to both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

    Both were wildly successful at one time, at well over 90% of the browser market share. But then each was decimated. Netscape Navigator was totally destroyed, and rendered extinct. Netscape Navigator became the Passenger Pigeon. IE, Navigator's successor, is now on the same path. Once representing 90% of the market, it is now down to 20% at most. It, too, could very well be practically extinct within a few years.

    But it is Chrome that needs to fear the most. It is the most used browser today, but it sees nowhere near the usage that Navigator and IE saw at their peaks. Chrome, too, could go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. All it would take is Mozilla undoing the stupidity that they have brought upon Firefox lately. If they canned the shitty designers who have ruined Firefox's UI, and brought back people who know what they're doing, Firefox could potentially crush Chrome. All that Firefox needs is a return to a good UI, and some fixes for the long-standing performance and memory usage issues, and it'd be a real contender again. Firefox could make Chrome become the Passenger Pigeon.