Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Found...on eBay

[Blue in a Red State]

http://www.kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=3307324&nav=0s3dZW0t

UT Studying Woodpecker Found On E-Bay

Just last week scientists in Arkansas spotted a bird they thought had been extinct for decades called an ivory billed woodpecker.

Now UT scientists are using a hi-tech approach to get an inside look at the bird once believed to be history.

Researching endangered or extinct animals is never easy as specimens are always difficult or impossible to find. In the case of the ivory billed woodpecker, UT researchers lucked out.

Their specimen was nesting, in of all places, e-Bay.

"I'd given up hope. I never dreamed that the bird was still alive. Much less I'd ever have a chance to look at a museum specimen of this. Much less for us to have one brought here to Austin for us to image and scan and work on," UT Geology Professor Timothy Rowe said.

The ivory bill woodpecker specimen they found is stuffed and mounted.

"For my masters I studied extinct birds so to see an ivory bill woodpecker is great. It's very exciting," UTCT Research Assistant Amy Balanoff said.

"This is the specimen Fish and Wildlife found for sale on e-Bay. You can see it's not a great specimen. It's a little moth eaten and a little worn," Rowe said.

"A woodpecker's skulls about this big and you could scan it on a medical scanner but it wouldn't get much detail out of it," Rowe said. "With our machine, we can scan very small slices and use X-rays to almost slice it up like a loaf of bread and then be able to look at it a slice at a time."

"The more we know about the bird, the better chance we have for its future and to help preserve it," Rowe said. "To think you could even find an ivory billed woodpecker on e-Bay just blows me away."

Rowe hopes to be able to produce the first, highly detailed, anatomical study of the woodpecker's skull.

He says investigation into its powerful neck could also help the medical community with brain injury research.