Colossal Biosciences says breakthrough means it’s a step closer to resurrecting giant moa

Source: Radio New Zealand

A multibillion-dollar de-extinction company believes it is one step closer to resurrecting New Zealand’s largest and long-extinct flightless bird.

Colossal Biosciences – headquartered in Texas – is heralding a “major breakthrough” in its development of an artificial egg that it says is crucial to giant moa – which died out around 500 years ago – once again walking the earth.

The company said it had successfully hatched 26 chickens from a novel artificial egg, designed to be reproduced at scale and at any size.

The biotech company, which recently claimed to have resurrected the ‘dire wolf’, has courted controversy with its de-extinction projects, with critics questioning the ethics of de-extinction and whether it is even a valid claim.

Although its South Island giant moa project faced some backlash when it was announced almost a year ago, it has financial backing from filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson and is run in partnership with Ngāi Tahu Research Centre and Canterbury Museum.

[embedded content]

Colossal’s Australia-based chief biology officer, Andrew Pask, is convinced a lack of understanding is the main thing standing in the way of public support and said while the company’s core goal is to restore species, it also wants to use its technology to prevent further extinctions.

Speaking to RNZ, Pask – who is also a professor at the University of Melbourne – said the company’s latest technological development was a significant step in solving the chicken and egg conundrum inherent in the moa project.

Pask said the company is currently sequencing the moa genome (based on bone DNA) and hopes to find it only differs by a few percentage points from the genome of its closest living relatives, emu and the South American tinamou.

After that, he said a living relative’s cells – the best candidate – could be genetically edited with moa-specific genes.

“Once we have that, the cell needs to be turned back into a living bird and for that, there’s currently no surrogate bird species that lays an egg big enough, so we had to make the Colossal artificial egg.”

He said the egg’s silicone-based membrane – a 3D-printed lattice shell – allowed oxygen to diffuse inside, overcoming a major design hurdle since first attempts in the 1980s.

Pask said previous artificial eggs required high levels of oxygen to be piped in, causing damage to the DNA and long-term health of the growing chick.

“So we had to engineer the artificial egg, really from the ground up again.

“We wanted to make it as close as possible to development inside the natural egg, because we want to be able to hatch birds that are going to have a normal lifespan, normal reproductive capacity, so that we can use this for conservation purposes as well as recreating the moa – so we need to be able to recreate that really large egg.”

The egg could be used in a standard incubator, and in addition to good gas-exchange across the egg’s ‘shell’ the transparent design also enabled scientists – for the first time – to monitor the chick’s development in real-time, Pask said.

“All of those [developments] have been major, major breakthroughs.”

Pask said the project is on hold while they study the 26 chickens that have been hatched from the novel egg and provided they’re healthy with normal lifespans, the egg would then be “scaled up” to emu size.

The moa, however, was at least eight times larger in volume than an emu egg, he said.

“It’s an enormous egg, so to do that we’d have to have our initial moa … conceived inside an emu egg and then we’d take that emu egg and put it [the embryo] into a large artificial egg which would be moa sized … add extra yolk, extra albumen [egg white] … to increase the volume of those components, so that it can then sustain the growth of a much larger chick, which is going to be our baby moa.”

Pask said it was hard to say when that would happen, but “less than 10 years, I’d say – if you want a ballpark”.

In addition to the moa project, he hoped the artificial egg would act as a surrogate for critically endangered species – big or small.

“So bird species that are really struggling with reproduction or really struggling [to breed] easily in captivity – this could be an absolute game-changer for us, being able to create a lot of a particular species of bird that we’d be able to release back into the wild and really help to boost population numbers.”

He said the artificial egg also gave them a platform for early “genetic manipulations” on birds, possibly engineering them to be more resilient to disease or climate change.

In New Zealand, he said that could mean introducing genetic variation to species that had tiny populations.

“We can actually go back and sequence the DNA from animals that lived 50, 100, 150 years ago, have a look at the population diversity that they used to have and engineer that back in again, so you have really healthy breeding populations.”

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Original source: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/05/20/colossal-biosciences-says-breakthrough-means-its-a-step-closer-to-resurrecting-giant-moa/