EXTINCT AND FORGOTTEN

In case you think you have run out of things to do or see in Philadelphia, we have a new entry for your bucket list.

A dead pigeon.

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Pigeons are everywhere in Philly, but have you ever seen a baby pigeon? Or a dead one? Well now you can. And not just any dead pigeon, but a pigeon that went extinct slightly more than a century ago.

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First a little background.

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The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird in North America. There were literally billions of them, and their huge flocks could darken the skies. But sometime in the late 1800s, they began to disappear, whether due to deforestation, excessive hunting, disease, and/or some other cause.

By the late 1890s, the passenger pigeon was all but extinct. The last wild one, Buttons, was shot to death in 1900. And the last one in captivity, Martha, croaked at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

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The Academy of Natural Sciences, now part of Drexel University, is a superb (and superbly maintained) museum - the perfect place to take the kiddos to see dinosaurs and live butterflies. If you make it up to the top floor, you will briefly pass by a small unmapped area known as the Extinct Bird Hall. There you will see two dioramas displaying extinct birds, most of which became extinct in recent centuries - birds like the dodo and (no joke) the 12-foot-tall moa of New Zealand. And it is there that you will also find the stuffed remains of a real passenger pigeon.

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At least it was there the last time we checked.