A Dallas-based company announced Tuesday it hatched baby chicks from a 3D-printed silicone shell \u2014 and it wants to use that technology to bring back an extinct 12-foot-tall New Zealand bird.<\/p>\n
Colossal Bioscience said it used a silicone-based membrane to mimic the breathing properties of real egg shells, which have a system of pores that bring in oxygen for the embryo. <\/p>\n
The shell is crucial to bringing back the South Island giant moa \u2014 think a taller and hairier ostrich \u2014 which were birthed from massive eggs that no current bird can carry as a surrogate.<\/p>\n
“The genome is the blueprint, but without a place to build, it’s meaningless,” Andrew Pask, chief biology officer at Colossal, said in a press release. “The artificial egg gives us that platform: controlled, scalable, and completely independent of a surrogate.”<\/p>\n
Previous attempts at hatching live chicks from artificial shells started in the 1980s, but required lots of pure oxygen that caused health issues for the birds, according to Colossal.<\/p>\n
The giant moa were hunted to extinction some time in the 13th or 14th centuries by early Maori hunters<\/a> in New Zealand. But researchers at Colossal aim to use fossils carrying traces of giant moa DNA to reconstruct the bird in a manner not too different from how dinosaurs were recreated in the Jurassic Park films.<\/p>\n Colossal was created in 2021 and is also working to bring back the wooly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo bird and bluebuck.<\/p>\n The company received national attention in 2025 with its announcement that it had brought back the dire wolf<\/a>, an ancient wolf native to North America. The company said it created three dire wolf pups \u2014 Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi \u2014 by modifying the genes of a gray wolf and using a domestic dog as a surrogate.<\/p>\n