The collection of passenger pigeons now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum is small, but the carefully preserved birds could hold the answer to a Jurassic-sized question: Can extinct species be brought back to life?

U.S. scientists are using DNA from one of the museum’s dead birds in an attempt to recreate the species, which became extinct 100 years ago after the last surviving passenger pigeon, Martha, died in a Cincinnati zoo.

The process could take eight or nine years but if successful, would be the first time that a truly extinct species was revived.

“The ethical and social implications are huge,” said ROM curator Mark Peck. “Could we just bring species back when we want them?” he asked. Would it impact conservation efforts?

But said Peck, the museum decided those questions should be answered by legislators. “From a scientific perspective it’s interesting to see if they can actually do this,” he said.

The work is being done by the American non-profit group Revive & Restore. DNA extracted from skin scraped from a long-deceased bird’s feet will be replicated and spliced into the genome of the closely related band-tailed pigeon, a wild pigeon that lives in the southwestern United States.

Passenger pigeons once migrated in massive flocks that numbered in the millions, swooping down into areas of deciduous forest where they feasted on acorns and seeds before moving on. The birds were also an agricultural pest and could devastate crops.

The ROM’s display depicts the birds on an April morning in the 1860s near the Forks of the Credit, a scene which was a permanent exhibit at the museum from 1935 until it was taken down in 1980.

The pigeons, named for the way they passed through an area, were the most abundant bird in the world, numbering six billion in the 1830s and 1840s.

Their numbers meant the birds were an important food resource. The pigeons were salted or smoked and shipped into the cities. In 1869, in Hartford, Mich., three train car loads of pigeons were shipped to market each day for 40 days — a total of 11,880,000 birds.

But the birds were hunted to extinction and within 50 years, the most abundant bird in the world was wiped out.

The population crashed because they didn’t have the numbers to breed successfully, said Peck. Zoos tried but couldn’t breed them in captivity. Some species of birds, such as puffins and auks, only breed in colonies of 100,000 or more, he said.

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When asked why we would ever want to revive any bird with the name “pigeon,” Peck laughed, but said the move is “partly to make up for the mistakes of the past.”