Researchers looking to bring back a long extinct 12ft-tall bird have successfully hatched the first chick from an artificial egg.
Colossal Biosciences revealed that the baby chickens emerged from a 3D-printed lattice structure engineered to replicate the function of a natural eggshell of a Giant Moa bird.
The Texas-based company, founded by billionaire entrepreneur Ben Lamm, has previously made headlines with claims of genetically engineering mice with woolly mammoth characteristics and wolf pups resembling dire wolves.
"It's a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit," said Mr Lamm.
The South Island giant moa, which weighed around 230kg, became extinct between 1380 and 1445 following Polynesian settlement.
The moa's eggs posed a unique challenge for any resurrection attempt, being roughly 80 times larger than a chicken's and approximately eight times the volume of an emu egg, far too large for any living bird to serve as a surrogate.
Previous attempts at creating artificial eggs had failed because scientists could not achieve proper airflow through the shell.
Colossal's solution involved designing a 3D-printed lattice structure combined with a bioengineered silicone-based membrane that replicates the oxygen transfer capacity found in natural eggshells.
The first chicken has been born using a 3D-printed egg
|Colossal Biosciences
"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," Mr Lamm explained.
A transparent window in the capsule allowed researchers to observe embryonic development in real time, with calcium supplements added to replace what would normally be absorbed from a natural shell.
However, the announcement has drawn scepticism from independent researchers, partly because the findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Dr Louise Johnson, an evolutionary genetics expert at University of Reading, said the news "sounds impressive" but, until there's a peer-reviewed paper, she "might as well give expert commentary on a YouTube ad".
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A skeleton of the Giant Moa is on display at the Natural History Museum
|GETTY
Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, argued the technology does not constitute a true artificial egg since fertilised eggs were poured into the system along with nutrients.
"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," Mr Lynch stated.
He added that any resulting bird would simply be genetically modified rather than an actual moa.
Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield, suggested such de-extinction efforts might prove more valuable for currently endangered species, where scientists could preserve genetic material from living populations.
The now extinct bird stretched over 12 foot
|GETTY
"My personal interests lie more in preserving what we've got than trying to bring back what is already gone," she said.
The moa project has attracted significant financial backing, including a $15million investment from Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson.
"My entire life I was told: 'Well, the moa's extinct,' but we're now at the point where being extinct isn't really the end of the story," Mr Jackson said.