The work on the little bush moa has yet to be published in a journal (the researchers posted a non-peer-reviewed paper on a public site), but colleagues in the small world of extinct genomes sang its praises. Morten Erik Allentoft of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, an expert on moa DNA and other extinct genomes, called it “a significant step forward.” Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led a 2017 study reconstructing the genome of the passenger pigeon, called it “super cool” because it “gives us an extinct genome on an evolutionary branch where we hadn’t had any before.”