And people are working to bring the chestnut back via genetic engineering: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/genetically-engineering-an-icon

And people are working to bring the chestnut back via genetic engineering: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/genetically-engineering-an-icon-can-biotech-bring-the-chestnut-back-to-americas-forests/276356/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/geneti... The problem with extinction is that you are throwing away a working code base that took 3 billion years to write. Every organism that goes extinct before we sequence its genome is an absolute tragedy.