Could this bring species back from egg-stinction?

Texas firm Colossal Biosciences, which has dedicated itself to resurrecting lost species, including the dire wolf and woolly mammoth, has hatched live chicks from an artificial egg for the first time — a crucial, “Jurassic Park”-esque step in its mission to bring back the moa and other giant, long-gone avians.

The first-of-its-kind artificial egg allows a bird embryo to develop completely outside of a biological shell while scientists oversee every aspect from early embryo to hatching.

The team hatched 26 “healthy” chickens, which “will live out their natural lives” at the company’s avian facility, CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm told The Post.

But the company says the implications go far beyond hatching domestic fowl.

Colossal believes that the tech could help save endangered birds with low hatch rates while also paving the way for resurrecting extinct avians such as the dodo and the moa — a large, flightless bird that was hunted to extinction in New Zealand by Māori settlers around 600 years ago

“We didn’t just copy nature,” Lamm declared to The Post. “We tried to re-engineer it.”

Unlike the company’s mammoth and dire wolf projects — which relied on mammal surrogates such as elephants and domestic dogs — giant avians pose a different challenge: There are no modern birds capable of incubating a moa egg.

Standing at up to 13 feet tall and weighing as much as 500 pounds, the avian’s egg was around eight times larger than that of an emu.

Colossal 3D printed a biologically accurate replica egg from titanium, a faux embryo comprised of a lattice shell lined with a bio-engineered silicone membrane that mimics how real eggs transfer oxygen. The porous liner, the company said, actually exceeds the oxygen transfer capacity of a normal chicken egg.

That solved a major problem that plagued the shell-less avian campaigns of the 1980s, when scientists had to pump embryos with supplemental oxygen — a process that often damaged the DNA inside, impacting the animal’s long-term health.

To test their viability, the scientists filled the eggs with chicken embryos, monitoring each stage of development through a portal at the top, as seen in a video of the process. The chick even taps against the artificial egg to let them know it’s ready to hatch.

The device is reusable, scalable, compatible with standard commercial incubators, and theoretically adaptable to eggs of any size, including those of the moa.

“The avian reproductive toolkit has lagged behind mammalian systems for decades because birds present unique developmental challenges,” said Dr. Beth Shapiro, chief science officer of Colossal. “The artificial egg changes that.”

The moa revival is being developed in collaboration between Māori’s cultural and intellectual institution Ngāi Tahu Research Centre and “Lord of the Rings” visionary Peter Jackson, a Colossal investor who explained that the de-extinction efforts will help ensure that “some of the most critically endangered species in Aotearoa/New Zealand are protected for future generations.”

Instead of placing them in a real-life “Jurassic Park,” though, Colossal says the resurrected moa would be introduced into its natural habitat in New Zealand.

In fact, Colossal may only be years away — possibly the “early- to mid-2030s,” explained Lamm — from creating the moa.

In 2025, Colossal announced that it’d successfully grown pigeon primordial germ cells — precursors to sperm and eggs — marking an important step in resurrecting the flightless Mauritian dodo, which went extinct 300 years ago.

Lamm said he foresees bringing it back to life within four or five years, potentially setting the stage for the moa’s second coming as well.

“So as you layer on additional extinct species in a certain workflow, I wouldn’t say they get easier, but you don’t have to design the system from scratch,” he said. “You just have to do the work.”

Before going full-throttle on the moa, the de-extinction honcho said that they’ll likely need to do another dry run with emu or ostrich eggs next.

Lamm said that he ultimately hopes that people will be inspired by seeing the moa in the flesh in the 21st century.

“Hopefully they see now we’re using a different form of innovation and technology to undo the sins of the past, as well as use those same technologies to help conservation,” he said.