Lord of the Wings? ‘Lord of the Rings' director backs plan to ‘de-extinct' New Zealand bird
The partnership, according to the The Associated Press, sprung up two years ago after Jackson learned of Colossal's work to bring back species like the wooly mammoth and the dire wolf.
A New Zealand native, Jackson is fascinated with the wingless, long-necked specimen. He called it 'part of the country's DNA,' in an interview with IGN.
The tallest of the flightless bird, the South Island Giant Moa, once roamed freely on the South Island of New Zealand, but became extinct about 600 years ago due to overhunting by the first Polynesian settlers, who arrived circa 1300.
It's particularly this rich, shared history is why Jackson wanted the involvement of the Ngāi Tahu, the principal Māori tribe of the South Island.
'The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do,' Jackson told AP.
Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh provided $15 million in funding to kick off the moa project with Colossal Biosciences, under one condition — collaboration with the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, per IGN.
Jackson, who owns one of the largest private collections of moa bones, facilitated the meetings between Colossal, the Ngāi Tahu and Paul Scofield, the world's leading moa expert.
The bone collection is significant enough that Scofield, who is also a senior curator of natural history at the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, described it as a 'comprehensive collection' when helping Jackson identify the different moa species represented in his collection.
The moa project is in its early stages, as scientists are looking for well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, Colossal's chief scientist Beth Shapiro told AP.
The process will resemble Colossal's current approach to genetically engineer living species in close relation to the specimen they're attempting to 'de-extinct.'
Comparing the moa's DNA sequence of living bird species to other flightless creatures such as tinamou and emu will help Colossal understand what made the moa unique, Shapiro said.
But working with birds presents a special challenge because of birds' embryos development inside eggs. Transferring an embryo to a surrogate will not look like mammalian IVF.
Scientists agree that is more feasible to tweak the genes of living animals than bringing back extinct species, which is likely impossible. They also worried that focusing on extinct creatures deters from conservation efforts of currently endangered species, per AP.
According to Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who is not involved in the project, if the Colossal team manages to create a bird with large feet and thick, pointed claws similar to the moa, they will also face the challenge of determining an appropriate habitat for it as reported by AP.
'Can you put a species back into the wild once you've exterminated it there?' he said. 'I think it's exceedingly unlikely that they could do this in any meaningful way.'
Pimm added, 'This will be an extremely dangerous animal.'
Some X users immediately pointed to the parallelism of extracting ancient DNA by referencing 'Jurassic Park.'
An entire X account devoted to the moa bird posted a flyer teasing a play-on-words title for Jackson's next epic trilogy: 'Lord of the Wings.'
In a Slashdot forum, a user-driven platform similar to Reddit that focuses on science and technology, a user under the moniker PFritz21 comically critiqued the project as misguided.
'Did Peter Jackson not watch the new Jurassic Park movie?!?!' PFritz21 wrote. 'Once to [sic] start bringing birds back from extinction, you start to think dinosaurs might be a good idea.'
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'It makes me a little bit sad there is this huge debate and angry voices about the common name,' he says. Dogfight Shapiro says she was surprised and saddened by the strength of reactions to Colossal's announcement. 'It was harder than I thought it would be, and the questions were getting meaner and meaner,' she says. But she and Colossal were quick to respond. 'Some of y'all are real mad about this,' she began in a video posted on X in April. 'You can call these animals proxy dire wolves or Colossal's dire wolves. All of that would be correct. We chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves and reflect the key traits we found by sequencing their genome.' A statement by Colossal to reporters in early April struck a more defensive tone. 'It's obvious most critics would rather complain than contribute,' it said. 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Nature has identified similar posts targeting other critics: Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, UK; palaeoecologist Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand; and Kristofer Helgen, an evolutionary biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lynch acknowledges that he has no direct evidence that Lamm or Colossal were involved. But he says he thinks that the articles targeting him and others were timed to undermine them just as the company was making major announcements, including those about the dire wolf and a gene-edited 'woolly mouse' that the company says lays the groundwork for its woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts. A Colossal spokesperson said the firm was unaware of the posts aimed at Herridge, Rawlence and Helgen, and became aware of those mentioning Lynch only when he accused Colossal of having a hand in them. The company and Lamm deny any involvement. 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In July, Colossal announced controversial plans to de-extinct moas, a group of giant flightless birds that vanished not long after humans first arrived in New Zealand. And the company remains bullish on its other efforts, predicting that mammoth-like elephants could arrive as early as 2028. Some critics are becoming concerned about how the company will conduct its work in the future, and what the impacts of that might be. In a 2021 opinion piece in Nature, Herridge, who had previously turned down an invitation to serve as a scientific adviser to Colossal, wrote that she felt the company's founders were 'driven by a real desire to help the world'. But after the dire-wolf roll-out, she's concerned about Colossal's approach and its priorities. 'We have a company that is only listening to people who agree with them, who is pushing forward with statements that they aren't backing down from,' she says. This 'is not really where we want to be with a technology that has the potential to change the way our world will look'. Lamm disagrees. 'We happily engage with critics,' he says. 'As scientists, we will absolutely consider new data presented and adapt our hypotheses and conclusions.'
