Colossal Biosciences has announced what it calls a major step toward bringing back the South Island giant moa, telling reporters this week that its researchers have successfully hatched 26 chickens from a transparent artificial egg the company sees as the foundation of any future moa revival.
The Texas based biotech firm is partnered with Sir Peter Jackson, the Ngai Tahu Research Centre in Christchurch and Canterbury Museum on a project to genetically engineer a living bird that resembles the lost giant. Jackson has poured more than ten million dollars into Colossal and has publicly championed the inclusion of the moa in the company de extinction roster. The announcement was reported by RNZ and confirmed by Colossal in statements to several other outlets.
At the centre of the breakthrough is a 3D printed silicone lattice that behaves like an eggshell but lets oxygen diffuse evenly across the membrane without external piping. Earlier artificial egg designs from the 1980s leaked too much oxygen and damaged embryonic DNA, which stopped chicks developing properly. Colossal says the new lattice solves that problem and is transparent enough that researchers can watch a chick develop in real time inside a standard incubator. The company hatched 26 healthy chicks as proof of concept.
The reason this matters for moa is scale. The South Island giant moa stood up to three and a half metres tall with its neck stretched and weighed around 230 kilograms. Its egg would have been roughly eight times the size of an emu egg, far larger than anything a living surrogate bird could carry. Colossal chief biological officer Andrew Pask, who is also a professor at the University of Melbourne, said in published statements that the plan is to first develop a moa embryo inside an emu egg, then transfer it into an artificial moa sized shell topped up with extra yolk and albumen so the chick has enough fuel to grow to full size.
Researchers are working in parallel on the genome itself, sequencing DNA extracted from moa bones and comparing it with the closest living relatives, the emu and the South American tinamou. The company expects the differences to be small in percentage terms, which is the basis of its claim that gene editing can produce a bird close enough to the moa to count.
Colossal chief executive Ben Lamm has put the timeline at five to eight years for a hatched bird. Pask has talked about a decade. The moa has been gone for around 500 years, hunted out within a century or two of human arrival in Aotearoa.
The Ngai Tahu Research Centre, established at the University of Canterbury in 2011, is supervising the iwi facing side of the work. Director Professor Mike Stevens has said the project aligns with iwi values around advancing knowledge and engaging globally, and the centre will oversee how mātauranga and tikanga sit alongside the lab work.
The response from independent scientists has been mixed. University of Otago paleogeneticist Associate Professor Nic Rawlence called the artificial egg really impressive work but pointed out there is no peer reviewed publication attached to the announcement. He also said true moa de extinction remains far away, with major unresolved questions around embryo development and sourcing enough yolk for an egg that size. Rawlence has previously expressed concern that some iwi do not support de extinction at all. His comments to RNZ were echoed by other researchers.
Otago geneticist Michael Knapp was more positive on the conservation flow through. He told reporters the innovation is real and could be valuable for endangered native birds like kākāpō and kakī, where every egg matters and every embryo lost is a serious setback for a tiny population.
Massey University animal welfare scientist Ngaio Beausoleil warned that the regulatory checks around genetic technologies are too thin. She described the risk as a Pandora box situation, where a technology turns out to cause harm but cannot be wound back. She has called for animal welfare evaluation to be built into the science from the start rather than added at the end.
The strongest pushback came from University of Otago geneticist Professor Peter Dearden, who told NZ Herald the goal is impossible given the moa lineage stretches back across 4.3 billion years of evolution. Te Pūnaha Matatini researcher Professor Amanda Black added that biology is vastly more complex than what engineering can currently offer.
Colossal has been clear that it sees the artificial egg technology as having a life beyond the moa project, with potential applications in breeding programmes for critically endangered species and in research on disease and climate resilience in birds. The company has said it intends to make the technology freely available for conservation work.
For New Zealanders, the immediate effect is more philosophical than practical. There is no moa walking around yet, and there may never be. What there is, for now, is a 3D printed silicone egg, 26 healthy chicks, and an unusually direct argument between Texas biotech ambition and the patience of scientists who study what extinction actually means.
What do you reckon, should we be cheering the science or putting the brakes on de extinction before it goes too far. Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply