Biotechnology company utilizing artificial eggs to resurrect extinct species | NewsNation

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]They've already brought the direwolf back from extinction. By the year 2028, they want to deextinct the woolly mammoth. And tonight, the startup Colossal Biosciences says they've successfully hatched nearly 30 chicks using artificial eggs. Yes, you heard that right. Here's a look at how they did it.

[00:00:23]>> Such a good job.

[00:00:25]When I held the chick that came out of the artificial egg, what went through my mind was, "This is amazing."

[00:00:31]>> I mean, that is amazing. The goal is to use the artificial eggs to help deextinct the moa, a bird from New Zealand that went extinct, are you ready? 600 years ago. Colossal Biosciences Chief Biology Officer Andrew Pasque joins us now for more. Wow, what a story. I mean, this is incredible work that you guys are doing. take us through how the process started and how long it took to hatch that first successful chick.

[00:00:59]>> Yeah, we've been working on this for a really long time now to try and perfect an artificial system that really recreates exactly what would happen during the normal egg when a bird develops. And the reason we needed to make this artificial egg is because we're trying to bring back this bird species, the mower that you mentioned before, which was a 12 foot tall bird that used to roam across the New Zealand landscape. And it was hatched from an egg about the size of a footballow.

[00:01:29]>> And there's currently no birds today that produce an egg anywhere near that big. So, we needed to work on creating this artificial egg environment that we could then use to hatch this species, but also we can use it for a whole host of other bird species that are critically endangered and struggling with reproduction and producing healthy offspring.

[00:01:47]>> Yeah, it sounds like size matters on this one because the Moe's egg, I understand, is about 80 times the size of a chicken egg. I guess that's why you needed to develop this technology.

[00:01:59]>> Yeah, it's an absolutely huge egg. And so we had to really think very carefully about how we engineer this device. We needed something that was going to work just like a natural egg, but also that was really scalable. And so we had to work uh you know with bioengineers, with mechanical engineers, with biologists like myself to really try and understand these incredible properties that the egg has. So although an eggshell looks really solid, if you ever hold a chicken eggshell up to a really bright light, you'll see there's actually lots of tiny little holes all throughout it. And that's really important for gas exchange. So, as that chick is developing inside the egg, it needs to exchange a lot of gases. It needs a lot of energy that it gets from the yolk.

[00:02:39]And we need to completely recreate all of that in our artificial egg system.

[00:02:43]And we really wanted to work on one that kept the process as natural as possible so that we could have really normal uh chick development right the way through until hatching. And so this whole process, you know, we've been working on it for a couple of years from a design perspective to then actually putting in these uh early chicken eggs. And what we do is that the chicken will lay an egg and uh we bring that into the lab. Then we very carefully will cut that eggshell open and we'll put that egg straight into this artificial egg environment that then goes into an incubator and uh then we can watch the whole process of development. And I think you're seeing the device now. One of the things we really wanted to engineer into this is this really big window that you can see on the top so that we can really carefully study that entire process of bird development right from the very beginning right up until the end where you can see it's starting to get little feathers and then eventually start to push through that membrane and hatch from the artificial egg. A >> and what's the timeline from beginning to end of trying to hatch a moa with an artificial egg? What's the timeline again? Yeah. So mowers probably gestated for a couple of months. So we have uh you know quite a long window maybe 60 plus days that we would need to grow our little mower. These chickens that you're seeing here now are 3 weeks. Uh so they take about 20 21 days uh to actually go from the egg going into the device to then actually hatching a healthy little chicken out from that egg.

[00:04:06]>> Wow. This is really incredible to watch.

[00:04:09]And I understand that your company is known for deextincting the dire wolf.

[00:04:14]And you say that you're on track to deextinct the woolly mammoth in 2028. Uh so what that's incredible. So what why are you doing all of this? What is the end goal?

[00:04:27]>> Yeah, I think you know the the the real issue we have today that we're facing in our world is this incredible rate of extinction of species that we're seeing, you know, across our entire planet.

[00:04:36]We're still uh losing species at a rate that has never been seen before on our planet. We're in the sixth mass extinction event where we're losing species just at this incredibly fast rate. The species that we're particularly working on were really important in the ecosystems. Things like the moa, things like the woolly mammoth, they're animals that we call ecosystem engineers. And so they really change the landscape around them. And that's really important for not just bringing back those species that humans hunted to extinction, but they also create really uh rich landscapes that support the growth and development of many many other species. You need those animals there to have all of those other species in that ecosystem in balance. And so it's really important that we're we're trying to, you know, use these technologies thoughtfully to bring back some of these species that are just so critically important for our planet. And and that's not the only extinct animal.

[00:05:30]I understand. You told us that you're also hoping to bring back the dodo. Tell us more.

[00:05:35]>> Yeah, so the dodo's another one that the artificial egg could really help with.

[00:05:38]Um the artificial egg really opens up all of these possibilities for us being able to do a lot of genetic engineering and manipulations in bird embryos, which is something that is is really difficult to do. And so it's been an incredible advance for us now to be able to do that work that really helps us with these other bird species, the dodo, another uh bird species that went extinct driven by humans to extinction in Maitius. Again, a really important uh ecosystem engineer. So the mo the mower and the dodo used to eat very specific plants and plant seeds and they would then distribute those seeds across the landscape and they really are important for maintaining entire landscapes of animal animals. So really really critical uh species there. Yeah, you can see the Tasmanian tiger is another one from my home country of Australia that we're working on and then also the blue buck which which is an extinct uh antelopee species from Africa. So we have a really interesting range of animals that we're working on from marsupials to placental mammals and birds obviously. And really great thing about these projects is that every single technology that we develop for that deextinction pipeline can be used for conservation of living animals that are on the brink of extinction as well.

[00:06:49]So we're we're really deploying a lot of that technology to save animals from going the way that these species have of going extinct. And then in these cases, we actually can use that technology to bring those animals back from extinction that were really important in those landscapes.

[00:07:05]>> Andrew, I've got to ask you, for all the Jurassic Park fans out there, have you ever considered dinosaurs? I mean, because you're going back hundreds of years on some of this.

[00:07:14]>> I'm a huge Jurassic Park fan, and you know, who doesn't love dinosaurs? But the critical thing that we need in each one of these uh deextinction programs is we need to have a genome or the DNA from that extinct species. And DNA although it can last hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of years, dinosaurs went extinct 60 million years ago. So I hate to be a disappointment to everybody, but there is no DNA left in any dinosaur specimen. So we're not going to see a deextincted uh dinosaur anytime soon.

[00:07:47]>> All right. Well, we'll continue to follow your work. You'll come back and give us an update, right?

[00:07:52]>> Absolutely.

[00:07:52]>> All right, Andrew Pasque, thank you so much for being with us tonight. We appreciate it.

[00:07:57]>> Thank you very much.

[00:07:58]>> And good luck to you with everything you're doing.

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