Subject: po'ouli , resurrection and the bible
HONOLULU - One of the rarest birds on Earth came closer to being wiped out - if not already extinct - with the death of one of the last three believed to exist, officials said.
The male po'ouli bird died in captivity late Friday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday.
"This species was a unique part of Earth's history," said Eric VanderWerf, the Fish and Wildlife Service's Hawaiian bird recovery coordinator. "We'll never have another one like it if it disappears. I kind of liken it in someway to the loss of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel. If we lost that, we could never get it back. We can never get another one."
The rare Hawaiian honeycreeper had been kept at the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Olinda since it was captured for breeding on Sept. 9. Biologists failed to capture a mate for the aging bird, which was found in the Hanawi Natural Area Reserve.
"The tragic death of this bird means that we may now be too late to prevent the addition of Po'o-uli to the depressingly long list of recent extinctions in Hawaii. It should serve as a wake-up call to redouble our efforts to save Hawaii's threatened species, in particular the 12 species listed as Critically Endangered." —Dr Stuart Butchart, Global Species Programme Coordinator, BirdLife International
"Hawaii's bird extinction crisis is a global tragedy that is largely being ignored. That the world's wealthiest nation is allowing bird extinctions to continue, largely unchecked, in its own back yard is unconscionable." —Dr George H Fenwick, President, American Bird Conservancy
"This unfortunately is an opportunity for people to say, 'I know the hour, the day, the hour, the minute, the second, it went extinct,"' Lieberman said. "That is a sobering moment."
But biologists aren't giving up hope.
Tissue samples from the bird were saved for cryogenic preservation for possible cloning in the future.
"Someday, when technology catches up with our fantasies, we may be able to resurrect the po'ouli because we saved these cells," Lieberman said.
for more
http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2004/12/hawaiian_tragedy.html
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13477853&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=222077&rfi=6
cloning did I hear cloning... is this the way we will resurrect life on earth?
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