In a Dallas lab, a company that wants to resurrect the dodo just hatched a chicken in a plastic egg. Colossal Biosciences says more than two dozen healthy chicks have now emerged from its 3D-printed artificial eggs, a key step in its plan to one day grow embryos of long-extinct birds like the dodo and New Zealand's giant moa. The open-top pods, which include a solid outer grid of hexagons and an inner membrane of silicone, are engineered to mimic a real shell, letting in oxygen while sealing in fluid, per USA Today. Colossal is now scaling them up from chicken size toward the slightly-larger dodo and football-size moa versions because "there's no bird on Earth today that could grow a moa embryo inside of one of their eggs," a Colossal bioengineer tells NPR.
The company's de-extinction ambitions—extending beyond birds to the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and bluebuck antelope—have drawn both enthusiasm and unease. Some biologists see conservation potential for endangered species in Colossal's work on artificial eggs and wombs. Others argue that in reviving extinct species, Colossal could bring about ecological disruption. Still others argue Colossal isn't really restoring vanished species, but creating genetically edited look-alikes using living relatives, such as the Nicobar pigeon in the case of the dodo. Colossal counters that "there's nothing more ethical than what we're doing" and that, with gene editing, "extinction is no longer permanent." (See Colossal's living version of the dire wolf.)
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