The last heath hen died on Martha’s Vineyard in 1932. Despite an Islandwide effort to save the last living member of this species, a 10-year-old male nicknamed Booming Ben, the Vineyard became the reluctant host of an extinction.
“There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form again,” Vineyard Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough wrote in a 1933 editorial. But in the 80 years since, scientific advances Mr. Hough could not have foreseen have blurred the finality of extinction. Martha’s Vineyard could now be the site of a resurrection.
The heath hen is currently being proposed as a possibility for de-extinction by Revive & Restore, an organization that aims to coordinate projects that use genetics to rescue endangered and extinct species.
Read the full, original story: Never Say Never; Heath Hen May Get Its Boom Back
