Scientists launch effort to resurrect extinct giant flightless bird

SINGAPORE - At up to 3.6m tall, the South Island giant moa was the tallest bird that ever lived. It roamed New Zealand’s South Island before becoming extinct around 600 years ago.

Now, a team of scientists is trying to bring it back.

This effort is led by Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company, which on July 9 added the bird to a

list of extinct animals it hopes to resurrect

by altering the genes of their closest living relatives.

Other animals on the list include the dodo, woolly mammoth and thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.

To resurrect the giant moa, Colossal is working with New Zealand’s Ngai Tahu Research Centre, which is housed within the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

The project is also backed by several high-profile investors, including Mr Peter Jackson, the New Zealand-born director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Mr Jackson has one of the largest private collections of moa bones, reported the Associated Press.

Moas played an essential role in natural ecosystems, and for early ancestors of the indigenous Ngai Tahu tribe in New Zealand.

Professor Mike Stevens, Ngai Tahu Research Centre’s director, said in Colossal’s press statement: “During the 14th and 15th centuries, moa provided meat for sustenance, and bones and feathers for tools and decoration.

“And the loss of moa, through over-harvesting and habitat modification, was a salutary lesson as to the New Zealand archipelago’s ‘fragile plenty.’”

New Zealand is a biodiversity hot spot due to its isolation from the rest of the world and natural history, with a high proportion of endemic species – or species found only in a single defined geographic location – Colossal added in a media statement.

“Colossal Biosciences has committed a large investment to New Zealand to build biotechnology within and protect its unique biological heritage, including flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth,” it said.

But many scientists are sceptical of the ethics behind such costly “de-extinction” efforts, which sap funds that could otherwise be used to conserve currently endangered species.

Setting out to revive extinct species may be “intellectually interesting, but really should be a low priority”, Dr Scott MacDougall-Shackleton told CNN.

“If we are concerned about island bird conservation there are hundreds of threatened and critically endangered species in New Zealand, Hawaii and other Pacific islands that need conservation resources more urgently,” added the co-founder and director of the Advanced Facility for Avian Research at Western University in Canada.

Whether or not “de-extinction” is even possible is also a contentious issue among members of the scientific community.

In April 2025, Colossal made the news for announcing

the birth of three pups of the dire wolf

– an extinct canine predator – which they had birthed by partially altering the genome of its closest modern-day relative, the grey wolf.

Dr Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, told The Guardian: “Is de-extinction possible? No, it is not possible. What you could potentially do – we’ll see – is create a genetically modified organism that may contain some appearance traits that are linked to a previously extinct species based on what we think they were like.”