Lord of the Rings director wants to resurrect extinct giant flightless bird

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson plans to spend millions on resurrecting a giant flightless bird that was hunted to extinction 500 years ago in New Zealand.

The 63-year-old believes it is possible to bring back the moa, at 10-12ft once the tallest bird on Earth, centuries after the creature was killed off by Maori hunters.

The moa had sturdy legs and a long neck, and lived on a diet of leaves, twigs and fruit. They used to inhabit a vast swathe of New Zealand from the coast to the mountains.

New Zealander Sir Peter has teamed up with Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences in an attempt to bring his country’s lost giant back to life, almost Jurassic Park-like.

It is the company which earlier this year claimed to have “de-extincted” the dire wolf, when it announced the birth of three pups.

Sir Peter, who is estimated to be worth £1.3 billion, has not only invested £11 million in the company, but he has made available his private collection of 400 moa bones.

Using the DNA from the bones and that of the nearest surviving relatives, such as the emu and the South American tinamou, Colossal believes it can genetically engineer a moa.

“The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do,” Sir Peter said.

“There were probably 150,000 giant moa walking around,” he added.

“We don’t want to release them into the wild and we don’t want to put them into zoos. We want to be able to give the moa a natural environment as big as we possibly can”.

It is not just the moa and dire wolf on Colossal’s agenda, Sir Peter added.

“The Colossal team is working diligently towards bringing back the woolly mammoth, the dodo and many other extinct animals – that hitherto only lived in our imagination,” he said.

“We’re on the eve of de-extinction stepping out of the realm of speculative science fiction, into an awe-inspiring new reality.”

Other eyebrow-raising achievements claimed by Colossal include developing “woolly mice” with traits of the woolly mammoth by using the genes of Asian elephants.

Experts voiced doubts that the moa could be brought back from extinction.

“It’s not possible to de-extinct things,” Vincent Lynch, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo, in the US, told The Telegraph.

“Technically, given enough time, I think they can probably do what they say that they’re going to do, which is genetically engineer an emu to have some moa-like traits

“But that doesn’t make it a moa – that makes it a transgenic emu,” he added.

“The genetic engineering part is challenging, I think that they would have to create a sort of artificial egg to grow it in. I don’t know that that’s been done before, so they would have to invent that.

“The genetic engineering approach that they’re going to use has been done before, but not at this scale and not in an emu.”

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