A rendering of a giant moa bird, which was hunted to extinction in New Zealand in the 1400s. - Credit: Courtesy of Colossal biosciencesOn Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced their plans to bring back the tallest bird that ever lived, which has been extinct for nearly 600 years. The giant moa — a husky, wingless bird that could stand almost 12 feet tall — once booked it across New Zealand’s landscapes on legs that looked like a cross between an overgrown chicken and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The moa has become closely linked with New Zealanders’ cultural identity, and for the Māori, the nation’s indigenous Polynseian people, it’s a symbol of resourcefulness, as well as a reminder of the importance of caring for the environment. Colossal hopes to welcome the first new moas within five to 10 years, after they finish collecting enough ancient DNA samples to sequence the bird’s genome.
This isn’t the first such announcement for the biosciences startup, which recently revealed they’d created three living dire wolves, a species not seen since roughly 10,000 BCE. The Dallas-based company has also been working to bring back the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, and the woolly mammoth — their flagship project, which has so far produced some headline-making (and heart-capturing) woolly mice.
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Colossal’s work has attracted a lot of attention from the public, and some controversy among conservationists and gene-editing scientists. In April, they debuted their dire wolf pups, which were created by editing parts of genomes sequenced from ancient DNA fragments into the genome of gray wolves, giving them dire wolf attributes. This prompted some in the scientific community to say they weren’t actually dire wolves, just genetically-modified gray wolves with a stellar PR team. Colossal’s chief science officer Beth Shapiro responded to taxonomical criticism by arguing that species are categories we use to group animals with similar attributes: “If it looks like a dire wolf and it acts like a dire wolf, I’m gonna call it a dire wolf,” she told Rolling Stone at the time.
The company’s “de-extinction” announcements, as the company calls their efforts to create animals with the attributes of species that have died off, have also attracted some major celebrity investors. While the dire wolves were promoted by investor George R.R. Martin, this latest project started with a pitch from Lord of Rings director and unofficial New Zealand tourism czar Peter Jackson, whose films introduced the world to the stunning mountain ranges and grassy plains of his homeland. He had long dreamed of bringing back the moa, right alongside wishing for personal submarines and jetpacks.
“Growing up in New Zealand, where the moa is such a predominant part of our national identity and culture, it was just like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if the moa could be brought back?” he tells Rolling Stone. “For decades, it seemed like a harebrained thought, just a pie in the sky. But then, when I spoke with Colossal for the first time a couple of years ago, I got the distinct impression that such a thing was no longer harebrained.”
Jackson suggested adding the moa to their roster for de-extinction. He also encouraged a partnership between Colossal and the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury, a leading institute of Māori indigenous scholarship in the region.
According to Ngāi Tahu Research Centre director Mike Stevens, hunting the moa for food — and using its bones and feathers for tools and decoration — played a crucial role in helping the Māori people adapt to living in New Zealand after they migrated from Polynesia in the 1300s. “[The moa was] the key resource that allowed this relatively small founding population to survive and grow and flourish,” Stevens says.
The Ngāi Tahu are the principal Māori tribe of the southern region of New Zealand — home to the South Island giant moa, the largest of the nine moa species Colossal plans to restore over the next five to 10 years. According to Māori lore, the 500-pound herbivores were fast runners who, once cornered, would defend themselves by kicking with those dino-chicken legs.
Over time, the Māori’s rate of harvesting the moa caught up with the bird’s population — in part because crops grew and replenished themselves less quickly in New Zealand’s subtropical climate than in the tropical Polynesian islands. “[The Māori] figured out that these islands offered a ‘fragile plenty,’ to borrow a phrase from one of the esteemed archeologists within our tribe,” Stevens says, referring to the nation’s abundant but vulnerable ecosystem.
After millions of years of shaping the nation’s grasslands and forests through their feeding habits and seed dispersal, the moa went extinct roughly 150 years after the Māori arrived. In researching the moa through their partnership with Colossal, Stevens sees an opportunity for the Māori people to make new discoveries about themselves. “We’ll learn more about our earlier ancestors and their distinct interactions with this landscape,” he says. “The way nature and culture continually shape one another.”
For the next six months, Colossal scientists and archeologists from the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre will focus on collecting ancient DNA samples. They have recently been searching for moa fossils in New Zealand caves, and they’ve already managed to extract around two dozen samples from Jackson’s personal collection of more than 300 moa fossils. They’ll combine these with some samples from the Canterbury Museum in their quest to have enough DNA to begin building moa genomes for all nine species — the first of which they aim to complete in the summer of 2026. In the meantime, they’ve already built a reference genome of the tinamou, a South American bird thought to be the moa’s closest living relative.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says the partnership with the research center signals a new step in the company’s work with indigenous groups. “The stewards and the people of this land, the Māori, inviting us in, and working with them in a true collaborative fashion, where the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre is the driver of the project is not a way we’ve ever collaborated before,” he says. “This is a long term partnership. We have gone so deep now in not just the ecological or environmental benefit of this species, but in the cultural history, it’s been awesome.”
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