When European settlers arrived in North America, they were stunned to discover a gorgeous parrot.

The face of the Carolina parakeet was red; its head was yellow, its wings green. Measuring a foot or more from beak to tail, the parakeets thrived in noisy flocks from the Atlantic Coast to what is now Oklahoma.

“I have seen branches of trees as completely covered by them as they could possibly be,” John James Audubon wrote in 1830. When the parrots landed on a farmer’s field, “they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly coloured carpet had been thrown over them.”

Within a century, the Carolina parakeet was gone. In 1918, the last captive died in a Cincinnati zoo. After a few possible sightings in the wild, the species was declared extinct.

Today, scientists are left with little information about the bird. But now a team of researchers has sequenced the genome of a specimen that died a century ago. The genome offers clues to how the Carolina parakeet became America’s native parrot millions of years ago, and how it disappeared.