The Dire Wolf Company's Next Target? A Giant Flightless Bird

Yahoo

3 days ago

It has taken no end of imagination for Sir Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning—and, not incidentally, knighted—director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, to produce his entire body of cinematic work. It's a quality Jackson has had since he was a small child, when he would conjure up visions of the future. 'When I was a kid [I dreamed of] personal jet packs and flying cars and things,' Jackson said in a recent conversation with TIME. 'One of those other things I always dreamed of was to be able to bring back extinct species.'
No-go on the jet packs and the flying cars. But the business of de-extinction? That's very much happening. In April, the Dallas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences announced that it had successfully brought back the dire wolf, an animal whose howl had not been heard on Earth since the last member of the species vanished more than 10,000 years ago. Three young dire wolves currently live on a 2,000-acre preserve in an undisclosed location to protect them from the media and curiosity-seekers, and Colossal aims to produce more of the animals, with the ultimate goal of perhaps rewilding the species.
Read more: The Return of the Dire Wolf
The company is not stopping there. Colossal also wants to bring back the dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger—or thylacine—and more. The goal is both to increase genetic diversity and to hone genetic editing techniques to fortify existing but threatened species. Now, Colossal has announced one more species to add to its growing menagerie: the emu-like moa, a giant flightless bird that stood up to 12 ft. (3.6 m) tall, tipped the scales at more than 500 lbs (230 kg), and once ranged across New Zealand, before it was hunted to extinction by humans about 600 years ago. Like the moa, Jackson is a native New Zealander; 'I am a very proud kiwi,' he says. He is also a Colossal investor and acted as intermediary and facilitator bringing the company into partnership on the moa project with the Ngāi Tahu Research Center, a group that was founded in 2011 to foster intellectual development and conduct scientific studies for and by the Ngāi Tahu tribe of the Indigenous Māori people.
'Some of those iconic species that feature in our tribal mythology, our storytelling, are very near and dear to us,' says Ngāi Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, who is working on the moa de-extinction project. 'Participation in scientific research, species management, and conservation has been a large part of our activities.'
'This is completely a Māori initiative,' adds Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal. 'We feel like the Colossal team is an extension of the research center and the Māori.'
Bringing back the moa would have implications not only for the species itself but for the environment it once inhabited and could again. The bird was what is known as a cornerstone species, one whose grazing and browsing helped prune and shape the jungle flora. Moas were also prolific dispersers of seeds from the plants they ate. The loss of the species not only eliminated that forest-restoring function, but also led to the related extinction of the Haast's eagle, which relied almost exclusively on the moa as prey. Restoring the moa would not bring the eagle back but could help at least partly restore the primal New Zealand woodlands.
Bringing back the moa is of a piece with Colossal's other work, which seeks not only to restore vanished species, but to prevent related ones from slipping over the event horizon of extinction. Genetic engineering mastered in the dire wolf project, for example, is being used to edit greater diversity into the genome of the endangered red wolf. Knowledge gained in the effort to bring back the thylacine could similarly help preserve the related northern quoll.
'There are some species of birds on the South Island of New Zealand that are endangered due to the fact that they have reduced gene pools,' says Paul Scofield, senior curator of natural history at Canterbury Museum, author of 20 papers on the moa genome, and one of the scientists working on the de-extinction project. 'Some of the technology that Colossal is working with is very applicable to them.'
Read more: Scientists Have Bred Woolly Mice on Their Journey to Bring Back the Mammoth
That technology is decidedly challenging. De-extincting the dire wolf involved sequencing ancient DNA collected from fossil specimens and then rewriting the genome of cells from a gray wolf to resemble the extinct species with the lost ancient genes. The edited nucleus was then inserted into a domestic dog ovum whose own nucleus had been removed. That ovum was allowed to develop into an embryo in the lab and then implanted into the womb of a surrogate domestic dog, which carried the dire wolf pup to term.'
Bringing back the extinct moa is harder since the incubating will be done outside the body, inside an egg. The first step in this work once again calls for sequencing the genome of the extinct target species and once again turning to a closely related living species—either the tinamou or the emu—for help. Colossal scientists will extract primordial germ cells—or cells that develop into egg and sperm—from a tinamou or emu embryo and rewrite their genome to match key features of the moa. Those edited cells will then be introduced into another embryonic tinamou or emu inside an egg. If all goes to plan, the cells will travel to the embryo's gonads, transforming them so that the females produce eggs and the males produce sperm not of the host species but of the moa. The result will be an emu or tinamou that hatches, grows up, mates, and produces eggs containing moa chicks.
'We've had some pretty big successes so far,' says Lamm. 'We have a breeding colony of tinamous but not emus, but have access to emu eggs through the many breeders out there."
None of this means that the work is remotely done. Lamm concedes it could be up to ten years before a moa once again walks New Zealand—though it could come sooner. 'I'd rather underpromise and overdeliver,' he says. For now, Colossal and the Ngāi Tahu Research Center are still working to sequence the moa genome, and to do that they have to get their hands on more DNA samples. Museum specimens of moa remains satisfy some of that demand, but DNA degrades significantly over the centuries and what can't be harvested from private collections has to be dug up in field excavations—with a special eye to long, DNA-rich moa bones like the femur and tibia.
'There are a couple of really significant fossil sites, particularly one in North Canterbury, about an hour north of Christchurch,' says Scofield. 'So far we've sampled more than 60 individuals.' If those don't prove sufficient, he adds, 'we will have to go out and dig some more holes.'
None of this comes cheap, and while Lamm does not disclose the exact funding for the moa de-extinction project, he does say it is an eight-figure sum. 'I saw the new Jurassic World movie and someone in it says it costs $72 million to bring back one animal,' he says. 'I was like, 'That's probably accurate.''
That up-front expenditure could pay off handsomely down the line, boosting ecotourism to New Zealand and benefiting Colossal's basic research, which is already showing for-profit potential. So far, Colossal has spun off two new companies: One, called Breaking, uses engineered microbes and enzymes to break down plastic waste. The other, Form Bio, provides AI and computational biology platforms for drug development.
But it's the intangibles—the wonder of midwifing a long-extinct species back to the global family of extant ones—that is Colossal's and the Māori's most transcendent work. 'This has an excitement value to it that movies don't have,' says Jackson. 'When I see a living moa for the first time I'm going to be absolutely amazed beyond anything I've ever felt.'
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [e-mail].