Colossal Unveils Artificial Egg Incubator To De-Extinct Giant Moa

BusinessMediaColossal Unveils Artificial Egg Incubator To De-Extinct Giant MoaByDavid Bloom,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I’m an LA-based columnist & consultant focused on tech & entertainmentFollow AuthorMay 19, 2026, 03:22pm EDTMay 19, 2026, 03:23pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. (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.”A developing chicken embryo in the Colossal artificial egg system(Image courtesy of Colossal Biosciences)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. MORE FOR YOUThe incubator had to mimic the unique properties of eggshells, including the ability to regulate o...