American biotech startup Colossal Biosciences, which has been promising to «bring back to life» mammoths, dodos, and other extinct animals for several years, has announced a new breakthrough. The company has shown off an «artificial egg» system that has already managed to grow and hatch chicks — without the usual shell.
American biotech startup Colossal Biosciences, which has been promising to «bring back to life» mammoths, dodos, and other extinct animals for several years, has announced a new breakthrough. The company has shown off an «artificial egg» system that has already managed to grow and hatch chicks — without the usual shell.
This is not a completely artificial creation of an embryo, but rather a 3D-printed shell that replaces an egg. Inside is a special silicone membrane that allows oxygen to pass through, like a real shell. And on top there is a transparent «window» through which scientists can observe the development of the embryo. This is written by MIT Technology Review .
According to the company’s chief biologist, Andrew Pask, the team has already successfully raised 26 chickens in such containers.
«Seeing them move around inside artificial eggs was absolutely incredible. It felt like you could grow life outside the body,» says Pask. Colossal believes that the technology will not only help preserve rare bird species, but will also eventually be part of a project to «revive» the giant moa, a flightless bird up to 3.5 meters tall that lived in New Zealand and disappeared about 750 years ago.
However, a real «resurrection» of the moa is still a long way off. To do this, scientists would have to insert thousands of genetic changes into the DNA of the modern bird — a technologically extremely difficult task even for 2026.
In addition, the scientific community has already criticized the startup’s loud statements. Some researchers remind that similar experiments with artificial shells for bird embryos have been conducted since the 1990s.
For example, Japanese scientist Katsuya Obara said that Colossal improved existing methods rather than creating a fundamentally new technology. «This is clearly an exaggeration. The technology here is a modification of existing approaches,» he said.
One of the potential real breakthroughs Colossal calls a membrane that allows the embryo to receive more oxygen without additional gas supply systems. In previous experiments, this has often been a problem — some chicks simply did not survive to hatching.
The company is also working on artificial «wombs» for mammals. But for now, birds are an easier direction, because their development takes place outside the mother’s body anyway.
The startup Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021. Since then, it has attracted more than $620 million in investments for gene editing and «de-extinction» projects — the return of extinct species. The company has previously claimed to have «recreated» the dire wolf, but at that time most scientists were also skeptical of these claims.
