May 19, 2026 / CBS/AP
A biotech firm that says it wants to bring back lost species announced it has hatched live chicks inside a 3D-printed, lattice artificial eggshell — a milestone the company says could one day help with its plan to recreate New Zealand’s extinct, 12-foot-tall South Island moa. The announcement drew both interest and skepticism from independent scientists.
Colossal Biosciences reported that 26 baby chickens, from a few days to several months old, were born after fertilized eggs were placed into the artificial-shell system and incubated. The company said researchers poured eggs into the lattice structure, supplied calcium that would normally come from a natural shell, and monitored embryo development with real-time imaging. The firm released photos and video of scientists handling the hatchlings.
Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm framed the work as solving an engineering challenge relevant to future plans to produce very large eggs that modern birds cannot lay. Moa eggs are about 80 times the size of a chicken’s, he noted, and a scalable artificial-shell platform could theoretically allow modified birds to be carried to term without a surrogate laying such an enormous egg. “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,” Lamm said.
Colossal has previously publicized genetic projects to create living animals that resemble extinct species, including mice engineered to grow long fur reminiscent of the woolly mammoth and dog pups fashioned to resemble dire wolves. The company also announced earlier ambitions to revive the woolly mammoth, the dodo and, in 2024, claimed progress toward the Tasmanian tiger.
Independent researchers say the new system is technically impressive but misleadingly billed as an artificial egg. While the 3D-printed shell and its membrane allow controlled oxygen exchange, critics point out the company supplied the other critical egg components — nutrient-rich yolk, membranes and transient embryonic organs that nourish and stabilize the developing chick and remove waste. “That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” said evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch of the University at Buffalo.
Lynch added that even if the platform can help make a genetically modified bird, it would still be a modified chicken-like animal, not a true moa. Nicola Hemmings, a bird reproductive biologist at the University of Sheffield, noted that researchers have long used transparent or modified shells to hatch chicks and study development. “Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” she said, adding that such systems do have value for studying development and potentially for conservation applications.
Colossal’s team supplied calcium and monitored embryos inside their lattice to mimic some shell functions, but the absence of all natural egg structures means work remains before the device could be called a complete artificial egg. There is also a long scientific road before any attempt to resurrect moa would be feasible: researchers would need to compare ancient moa DNA from well-preserved bones with genomes of living birds to identify targets for editing, and they would need to design much larger shells and suitable surrogacy strategies.
Beyond technical hurdles, ethicists and conservationists warn of ecological and ethical questions. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, pointed to the problem of habitat: “The big challenge is, what environment is this animal going to live in?” Even if a moa-like bird could be produced, the modern landscape is very different from the environments that once supported extinct species.
Hemmings and others suggest that techniques developed here might be better applied to conserving endangered species. Methods that preserve or rescue fragile bird embryos, hatch birds that do not breed well in captivity, or use frozen cells and DNA to boost genetic diversity could have more immediate conservation benefit than attempts to revive long-extinct animals. “My personal interests lie more in preserving what we’ve got than trying to bring back what is already gone,” Hemmings said.
Colossal, for its part, argues the artificial-shell platform could assist with rescuing fragile embryos and hatching birds that won’t breed in captivity, in addition to supporting long-term de-extinction research. Critics and supporters alike agree the work raises important questions about what de-extinction should aim to achieve and how to weigh engineering possibilities against ecological reality.