Anyway, when I went to NYSM over Thanksgiving break, Dr. Kirchman gave me an article that he and some of his peers had written about the North American ivory-billed woodpeckers.
I'm not quite sure how to get the reading on here, but here is a link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1686174/
Though I admit that some of the vocabulary went over my head, I found the article to be interesting as well as informative overall. Basically Dr. Kirchman and his colleagues used mitochondrial DNA to compare the ivory-billed woodpeckers and Cuban woodpeckers which are very similar to the ivory-billed. When Dr. Kirchman decoded the DNA, however, it was found that the two species of woodpecker had split off in the Mid-Pleistocene (more than one million years ago). The North American ivory-billed woodpecker was thought to be extinct until there were reported sightings of the bird in 2005, and by decoding the DNA in this experiment, Dr. Kirchman hoped to create a foundation that could test whether the sighted bird was really an ivory-billed woodpecker by comparing the DNA of a dropped feather or feces sample to his DNA sequence. There were no conclusive conformations of the ivory-billed woodpecker sighting, though, and no feces samples or feather were ever found to confirm a positive match.
<-- woodpecker :)
Thanks for the reading blog.
ReplyDeleteNow, go ask your mentor a question based on what you learned!