Level 1 — Absolute Beginner

Birds usually grow inside a real eggshell. Now, scientists have made a new egg that is not from a bird at all. The egg is made by a machine called a 3D printer.

The new egg has tiny holes for air. Inside, baby chicks can grow safely. The team at the company has hatched 26 healthy chicks this way.

The company is called Colossal Biosciences. They want to use this new egg for very large old birds that died out a long time ago, like the moa.

The moa lived in New Zealand. It was as tall as a horse and could not fly. People hope to see baby moas hatch one day with this kind of egg.

bird

An animal with feathers and wings.

egg

A round thing in which baby birds grow.

shell

The hard outside of an egg or nut.

chick

A baby bird.

scientist

A person who studies the world.

company

A group of people working together to make or do something.

moa

A large bird that lived in New Zealand long ago and is now extinct.

machine

A man made tool that does work.

Level 2 — Elementary

Colossal Biosciences, a Texas based company famous for working on bringing back extinct animals, announced on May 19, 2026 that its scientists have hatched live chicks from a fully artificial egg. The new system replaces a natural eggshell with a small device made by a 3D printer. It supports the full growth of a baby bird from a few cells all the way to hatching.

The artificial egg has two main parts. The outside is a hard, light lattice made by a 3D printer. The inside is a soft silicone membrane that lets the right amount of air in and out, just like a real shell. There is no need for extra oxygen pumps. So far the team has hatched twenty six healthy chicks this way.

Colossal is not just doing this to study birds. The company is working on a project to bring back the South Island giant moa, a huge flightless bird from New Zealand that went extinct about six hundred years ago. The biggest moa was about three and a half metres tall, twice the height of an adult human.

To bring back a moa, scientists would first need to make a moa embryo from edited cells of a close living relative like the tinamou. That embryo would then need an egg large enough and strong enough to host it as it grows for many weeks. A normal chicken egg is far too small. The new artificial egg solves the biggest practical problem in the project.

extinct

Having no living members left.

embryo

An animal in the earliest stage of development before it hatches or is born.

lattice

A frame made of crossed strips or bars.

silicone

A flexible man made material used in seals, baking moulds, and medical devices.

membrane

A thin layer that lets some things pass through but not others.

flightless

Not able to fly.

tinamou

A ground dwelling bird from Central and South America, distantly related to the moa.

cell

The smallest unit of life, the building block of all living things.

Level 3 — Intermediate

Colossal Biosciences announced on May 19, 2026 that it has hatched a flock of twenty six healthy chicks from a fully artificial egg, a milestone the company says clears the single largest practical obstacle facing its South Island giant moa de extinction program. The device, developed in collaboration with avian embryologists from Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury, replaces a natural eggshell entirely and supports complete embryonic development under normal atmospheric conditions, without supplemental oxygen.

Architecturally, the artificial egg consists of a 3D printed lattice shell that provides mechanical protection and gas exchange geometry, wrapped around an engineered silicone based membrane. The Colossal team explicitly designed the membrane's permeability to match the oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer characteristics of a natural eggshell at sea level, an unexpectedly nontrivial materials problem that earlier groups had tried and failed to solve since the first prototype shell less incubators were built in the 2010s. The chicks, drawn initially from chicken and quail lines, hatched on schedule and showed no obvious deficits in early post hatch development.

For the moa program, the platform is more than a curiosity. Colossal's plan, outlined in conjunction with Ngāi Tahu and supported by funding from filmmaker Peter Jackson, is to use CRISPR to introduce moa specific edits into the genome of a close living paleognath relative, most likely a Chilean tinamou, to derive primordial germ cells, and ultimately to grow embryos that approach the body plan of the South Island giant moa, Dinornis robustus. Because no living bird approaches the body mass of an adult Dinornis robustus, the only plausible route to a healthy late stage embryo runs through an artificial egg large enough and structurally robust enough to host one.

The announcement is not without controversy. A Nature commentary released the same day urged caution, warning that the artificial egg as it currently stands is calibrated for chicken and quail embryology and that scaling it by orders of magnitude in volume and incubation time is a separate engineering problem with its own failure modes. Conservation biologists have also questioned whether de extinction draws resources away from saving currently living New Zealand species, including the kakapo and the takahē. Colossal counters that the artificial egg has immediate dual use applications in rescuing compromised embryos of critically endangered birds and in finally putting decades of biobanked avian genetic material to productive use.

milestone

A significant point in development.

embryology

The branch of biology that studies the development of embryos.

permeability

The property of letting fluids or gases pass through.

paleognath

A group of mostly flightless birds that includes ostriches, emus, kiwis, and tinamous.

Level 4 — Advanced

Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas headquartered de extinction company best known for its work on the woolly mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo, announced on May 19, 2026 that its avian unit, working with embryologists from the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury, has hatched twenty six developmentally normal chicks from a fully artificial egg. The system replaces a biological shell entirely and supports avian embryonic development from cleavage through to hatch under atmospheric conditions, without supplemental oxygen and without the open dish based incubators that have constrained earlier shell less embryology since the early 2010s.

The device architecture pairs a 3D printed mechanically protective lattice with a bioengineered silicone composite membrane whose tortuosity, thickness profile, and macro porosity were independently tuned so that its measured oxygen transfer rate and CO2 elimination rate match the steady state of a natural avian eggshell at sea level. Initial proof of concept work used chicken and Japanese quail eggs, both species for which complete embryonic chronologies are mapped to a single sigmoidal yolk lipid consumption curve, and the company released egress hatch rates that compare favourably to control eggs incubated in standard biological shells. A peer reviewed manuscript is reportedly under review at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a Nature companion commentary urging methodological caution accompanying the company's press release.

For Colossal's South Island giant moa program, framed around the species Dinornis robustus and reportedly funded in part by filmmaker Peter Jackson with the explicit cultural assent of Ngāi Tahu iwi, the artificial egg is the critical enabling technology rather than a satellite curiosity. The plan, in outline, is to characterise the South Island giant moa genome from preserved bone material, identify allelic variants associated with moa specific traits in domains such as femur diameter, integument structure, and body mass scaling, edit the genome of an extant paleognath, most likely the elegant crested tinamou Eudromia elegans, to introduce a subset of those variants, and derive primordial germ cells that can be propagated in surrogate embryos. Because no living paleognath approaches Dinornis robustus in body mass, late stage incubation in a biological egg of any extant species is biophysically untenable, and a structurally robust artificial vessel is unavoidable.

The announcement has generated a measured ethical and ecological debate. The accompanying Nature commentary by avian conservation biologist Sara Bumrungsri and developmental biologist Jiri Forejt warns that the device has been validated only on small bodied galloanseran lineages, that scaling it by two orders of magnitude in volume and by a comparable factor in incubation duration introduces gas diffusion, vibration, and thermal regulation problems that have not yet been solved, and that the very concept of a Dinornis robustus engineered into a tinamou genomic background raises taxonomic identity questions that cannot be resolved by genome edits alone. Conservation organisations such as Forest and Bird have noted that Aotearoa New Zealand's critically endangered extant avifauna, including the kakapo, takahē, fairy tern and rock wren, remain funding constrained and that the resources concentrated on de extinction could in principle support an equivalent number of in situ rescue programmes. Colossal's response has emphasised dual use: that the artificial egg can rescue compromised embryos of currently endangered species, that its modular bioreactor packaging is being licensed to academic partners through a non profit subsidiary, and that the moa programme is itself iwi led with biocultural objectives that exceed straightforward species revival. The argument over whether reviving the moa would close an ecological wound left by Polynesian over hunting around 1400 CE or merely import a designer surrogate is unlikely to be settled by Tuesday's hatch.