A de-extinction company is bringing back a big bird dinosaur in the next 10 years

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A giant, flightless bird that roamed New Zealand before going extinct about 600 years ago is the next species on a controversial list of "de-extinction" targets from the biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal announced on Tuesday (July 8) that its scientists and local Indigenous partners will "bring back" the South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus) through genetic engineering within the next 10 years. D. robustus stood up to 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall and was the largest of nine known species of moa, all of which are thought to have gone extinct due to hunting by humans.

"We're bringing back avian dinosaurs," the company said in a post on Instagram.

Colossal previously claimed to have brought back the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus), an ice age predator that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago — but the reveal in April drew criticism from many experts, who said the animals were merely gray wolves with a few, cherry-picked dire wolf traits. Colossal also has plans to "resurrect" the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine (a wolf-like creature also known as the Tasmanian tiger), but these projects are similarly shrouded in controversy.

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In the moa announcement, Shapiro says Colossal will "bring the moa back to life" and Ben Lamm, the company's co-founder and CEO, says scientists will "return it back to the ecosystem."

"Despite Colossal Biosciences' eventual reframing of dire wolf de-extinction as actually creating an ecological replacement using a genetically modified grey wolf, there is no hint in their recent press release that the best we can hope for is an ecological replacement for a New Zealand moa," Seddon told NZSMC.

To recreate the giant moa, scientists will extract DNA from the remaining bones of all nine species and compare it to the DNA of living birds, Shapiro told Time Magazine. Researchers will then be able to pinpoint the specific genetic characteristics of moas and make those changes in the genome of either an emu or a tinamou, the two closest living relatives of moas, she said.

"It makes sense to use tinamous and emus as templates from which to align DNA of moa," Worthy said in his email. "Much work on DNA has shown tinamous are the sister species to moa. Emu are a reasonably close relative as well."

Genetically modified tinamou or emu cells will then be implanted into a surrogate from one of the two birds and left to gestate. Hatchlings will not be released into the wild nor kept in a zoo, according to the announcement, suggesting the birds will live out their lives in a fenced-off nature reserve.

Should the birds escape, Worthy said they wouldn't pose a danger to humans. "Moas wouldn't see humans as a threat, unless perhaps you tried to hug it, and in scaring it likely you would get kicked and quite likely, badly hurt," he said.

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