Chicks Hatch From World's First Artificial Eggs--A Breakthrough Key to Bringing Giant Birds Back From Extinction

[Judi Lynn]

by
Jeffrey Kluger
Editor at Large

May 19, 2026 10:14 AM CT

The egg is one of nature’s greatest little brainstorms. The largest single cell of any species, the egg is a self-contained engine of incubation, doing away with the need for a living womb to keep a growing organism safe, nourished, oxygenated, and alive. All of that happens automatically inside a shell that can be as small as a pea for a hummingbird and as large as a melon for an ostrich. Human beings, for all their engineering smarts, would be hard-pressed to invent something so simple and elegant and keenly imagined. Until now.

On May 19, Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, which last year made headlines when it effectively de-extincted the dire wolf, announced that it had hatched a flock of 26 live chicks from fully artificial eggs. The technology behind the breakthrough can be later applied to bring back the dodo and New Zealand’s giant, flightless moa—both on Colossal’s de-extinction “to do” list.

“Every new scalable system for de-extinction is ultimately a biology problem wrapped in an engineering problem,” said Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, in a statement that accompanied the announcement of the hatchings. “Restoring species like the South Island giant moa isn’t just about reconstructuring ancient genomes…it requires building an entirely new incubation system.”

Designing an artificial shell is not easy because a natural shell is deceptively complex. Made principally of calcium carbonate arranged in a crystalline structure, a typical egg shell is no more than 0.4 mm thick, and covered with up to 17,000 tiny pores to allow for gas exchange with the ambient atmosphere—carbon dioxide out, and oxygen in. There are, too, a pair of slick inner membranes in the egg that perform another critical function, protecting the growing chick from invading bacteria. But those membranes have to be exceedingly thin.

More:
https://time.com/article/2026/05/19/colossal-biosciences-artifical-eggs/

[chouchou]

1. Evolution is such a wonderful thing..

"Designing an artificial shell is not easy because a natural shell is deceptively complex. Made principally of calcium carbonate arranged in a crystalline structure, a typical egg shell is no more than 0.4 mm thick, and covered with up to 17,000 tiny pores to allow for gas exchange with the ambient atmosphere—carbon dioxide out, and oxygen in. There are, too, a pair of slick inner membranes in the egg that perform another critical function, protecting the growing chick from invading bacteria. ."