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The North American sky, according to historical accounts, was once black with passenger pigeons. Hunters, however, saw to it that the sky was clear of the birds by the second half of the nineteenth century. 'Martha', the last individual of the species, expired in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Writers have long elegized this vanished bird. The great conservationist-philosopher Aldo Leopold issued the most poignant tribute in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac: “We grieve,” he wrote, “because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.”

But what if we could once again see those victorious birds sweeping their path across the March skies?

Leopold could not have known that only a handful of decades after he wrote these words we would be on the verge of a scientific revolution in efforts to reverse the death of species. The 'de-extinction' movement — a prominent group of scientists, futurists and their allies — argues...