Biotech Firm Hatches Chicks in Artificial Egg, Eyeing ‘De-Extinction’ of 12-Foot-Tall, 500-Pound Bird

A biotechnology company famous for its plans to bring back the woolly mammoth has announced a major breakthrough: hatching live chicks using a fully artificial eggshell. The development by Colossal Biosciences marks a significant step toward the company’s ambitious goal of resurrecting the extinct South Island giant moa, a 12-foot, 500-pound bird that was hunted into extinction by the year 1500.The Dallas-based company successfully incubated and hatched 26 chicks using a novel shell-less culture system. The device features a 3D-printed outer lattice for protection, combined with a silicone-based permeable membrane that allows oxygen and carbon dioxide to naturally transfer, eliminating the need for pure oxygen supplementation.“This device changes everything. We’re showing the world that we can grow this whole bird in an incubator outside of an eggshell,” Colossal Biosciences said in a statement. “It’s a complete game-changer. Life finds a way.”To achieve this, embryologists carefully transferred early-stage embryos from real chicken eggs into the artificial system, adding nutrients and calcium. The transparent design also includes a window for real-time observation of embryonic development.“How do we replicate nature but also improve upon it?” Colossal said. “This is the first time the core engineering problem of artificial eggs has been solved.”The chief biology officer at Colossal, Andrew Pask, emphasized the system’s potential: “We’ve created a novel shell-less culture system that is fully scalable and biologically accurate. It’s a new system designed for long-term, healthy avian embryo development. The genome is the blueprint, but without a place to build, it’s meaningless. The artificial egg gives us that platform: controlled, scalable, and completely independent of a surrogate,” he said.The primary motivation for this technology is the South Island giant moa. Because moa eggs were roughly 80 times the volume of a chicken egg, no living bird could serve as a surrogate mother.Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm explained the proactive approach: “We wanted to build something that nature has done a pretty good job of developing and make it better and scalable and even more efficient. We didn’t want to wait till we were ready to birth a giant moa. We actually wanted to start working on the engineering challenges for surrogacy and birth now.”Despite the enthusiastic announcement, the claims have been met with mixed reactions from the scientific community. Evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch, who studied the genomes of Arctic woolly mammoths, said that pouring fertilized eggs into an artificial shell isn’t a true artificial egg. He accused Colossal of conducting “‘science’ by press release.” “Show us the recipes,” he said in a post on the Bluesky app. “The #ColossalBio artificial egg shell is cool and all, but these GMO birds are just deep fake dodos and moas not #DeExtinction ones.”A University of Sheffield scientist who studies bird reproductive biology, Nicola Hemmings, noted that similar crude technologies have existed for decades. “Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” Ms. Hemmings told the Associated Press, adding, “My personal interests lie more in preserving what we’ve got than trying to bring back what is already gone.”A professor of stem cell sciences at King’s College in London, Dusko Ilic, agreed the translational value lies in conservation. “Recreating an extinct species such as the moa would require far more than an incubation platform, including accurate genome reconstruction, appropriate development, physiology, behavior, welfare, and ecological context,” Mr. Ilic told the Daily Mail. “Even then, the result would likely be an engineered proxy rather than a true restoration of the extinct species.”Despite the skepticism, the company insists the technology is a triumph. “The ability to incubate avian embryos outside a biological shell — at any size and in standard commercial incubators — is a capability conservation programs simply don’t have today,” said the chief animal officer and head of the Colossal Foundation, Matt James. “We’re building it for the moa, but it’s designed to support critically endangered species broadly. This represents a new platform for avian conservation. The artificial egg allows us to rescue compromised embryos, build genetic rescue platforms, and utilize donor and biobanked material in ways that weren’t previously possible,” he said.

Biotech Firm Hatches Chicks in Artificial Egg, Eyeing ‘De-Extinction’ of 12-Foot-Tall, 500-Pound Bird

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