The ambitious Vertebrate Genomes Project may have some good news for two endangered species: the kakapo and the vaquita.
The flightless kakapo of New Zealand is in trouble. The world’s heaviest parrot—representing one of the most ancestral branches of the parrot family tree—is nearly extinct, with barely 200 adults plodding the underbrush of four small islands. Whether the last of the kakapos have the genetic resilience to survive has long been unknown, and a question that only high-quality genomic analysis could answer.
But a high-quality genome assembly does not exist for the kakapo—nor for most of the 70,000 vertebrate species alive today. As a result, questions abound about how best to prevent the extinction of species like flightless kakapos and adorable vaquita dolphins.