(Image courtesy of Colossal Biosciences)

The celebrity-backed mega-startup Colossal Biosciences took a big step toward one of its major species de-extinction projects, unveiling an artificial bird embryo incubator that eventually will be used to hatch the massive chicks of the long-dead Giant Moa of New Zealand.

“Every new scalable system for de-extinction is ultimately a biology problem wrapped in an engineering problem," said Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm. “Restoring species like the South Island Giant Moa … requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists and scales in ways that ordinary biology simply doesn’t. It’s a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit.”

As with other Colossal projects, this artificial bird incubator started with a more modest process focused on developing and hatching ordinary chickens, whose biology is well known and whose reproductive cycle takes less than a month, allowing rapid iteration.

But creating an artificial incubator was necessary because the Giant Moa, a flightless bird that was hunted to extinction on New Zealand a few hundred years ago by Maori settlers, also had giant eggs, far larger than any living bird, even an ostrich, could possibly carry and lay. The Moa itself stood 10 feet high or more.

The incubator had to mimic the unique properties of eggshells, including the ability to regulate oxygen exchange, humidity and more for the developing embryo, said George Church, a Harvard Medical school genetics professor and Colossal co-founder .

“The embryo needs a place to grow that recapitulates the gas exchange, humidity, and mechanical environment of a natural egg — at whatever size the species requires,” Church said. “Colossal’s artificial egg solves the scalability dimension. It is a platform technology, and its implications extend well beyond any single species.”

Colossal is also working on de-extincting the dodo, another South Pacific flightless bird species wiped out by hungry settlers. Colossal also is working with Australian academics to preserve several endangered bird species.

Its researchers are also working on several long-gone mammals, including the wooly mammoth and Tasmania’s thylacine (colloquially known as the Tasmanian Tiger though it was a carnivorous wolf-like marsupial). It already has de-extincted a version of the dire wolf, a North American carnivore that died out several thousand years ago. The organization is also helping preserve critically endangered species including the northern white rhinoceros and isolated groups of North America’s red wolf.

Colossal scientists called the artificial incubator a “platform” that is undergoing further refined and expansion, including with “development of a self-hatching lattice structure, along with robotic-assisted earlier-stage embryo transfer protocols to reduce variability in starting material,” according to a company release.

The technology has other applications, including for developing egg-white-based therapeutic materials that traditionally required more expensive and time-consuming animal tissue-culturing processes.

Dallas-based Colossal has attracted $615 million in investment capital, including such luminaries as Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, retired NFL quarterback Tom Brady and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. Its non-profit arm, which focuses on areas such as technology transfer to indigenous groups, has raised another $100 million.

The company has had a string of notable recent announcements, including adding an extinct South African antelope called the bluebuck to its list of de-extinction targets.

The company also recently announced that one of its spinoff companies, an AI-focused firm called Astromech, had reached “unicorn” status with a $2 billion valuation.

Astromech focuses on ”evolutionary trajectory prediction — modeling not just where an organism’s genome is today, but where it’s headed and where vulnerabilities will emerge along the way. By integrating deep learning across species with ancestral reconstruction, the platform identifies the regulatory mechanisms and selection pressures that shape biological outcomes over time."

Potential applications for Astromech’s specialized AI include “human oncology, antimicrobial resistance, vaccine design, livestock disease, and engineered biology,” Colossal said.

Below is a video from Colossal Biosciences featuring a lot of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Strauss soundtrack as well as comments from investor and Peter Jackson, a New Zealand native and major backer of the Giant Moa: