
We weren’t quite sure what to think when Tap4Fun first asked if they could host a donation event for Revive & Restore’s Woolly Mammoth Revival Project in their game, Brutal Age. So we Googled them: Tap4fun, with its headquarters located in Chengdu, China, is a mobile game company focusing on creating top-notch mobile games for global players. In the prehistoric game Brutal Age you get to forge your horde with cities and outposts on the map and push the border against global competitors. Justin Quinn, our woolly mammoth project coordinator, checked them out with Meghan Foley from our office—and both agreed that it would…
-Ben J. Novak Revive & Restore’s Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback began in 2012 with two questions: Can we bring back the passenger pigeon to the eastern forests of the United States? And if so, why bring it back? To answer these questions, Revive & Restore with scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, sequenced genomes, crunched population models, reviewed historic records and forestry science, and more. This new research significantly reshapes accepted scientific views of this iconic species. Can we bring back the Passenger Pigeon? We can’t bring the passenger pigeon back as a exact clone from a historical…
The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was the dominant species in eastern North American forests for tens of thousands of years prior to its extinction in 1914. The birds lived in megaflocks comprising up to several billion individuals, moving nomadically as they consumed fruit and mast, the seed of beech, oak, chestnut, and other forest trees. The size and density of passenger pigeon flocks as well as their migratory patterns and their diet shaped the abundance and the distribution of tree species in these forests. In fact, the passenger pigeon was an ecosystem engineer of eastern North American forests for tens…