Imagine cracking open an egg… that has no shell.
And inside — a healthy, chirping chick.
Not CGI. Not a concept. Real.
That's exactly what Colossal Biosciences just pulled off.
26 chicks. Hatched. From fully artificial eggs. 🐣
Forget the supermarket picture in your head.
A real eggshell is quietly genius. It:
Replacing that? Ridiculously hard.
Colossal's fix: a 3D-printed structure wrapped in a soft silicone membrane that breathes like the real thing.
No actual shell. No supplemental oxygen. Just science doing science things.
And the chicks? They developed normally… and hatched.
Because this isn't really about chickens.
Colossal has been very loud about one dream:
Bringing back the giant moa — a 3.6-metre-tall flightless bird that towered over New Zealand until humans wiped it out around 600 years ago. 🤯
You can't exactly ask a moa to sit on its own egg.
There are no moas left.
So if you ever want to hatch one… you need to build the egg yourself.
This is step one of a very, very long road.
Forget extinct birds for a second.
Living birds are in trouble too.
Some species have populations so small, every single chick counts.
Others lay eggs that are almost impossible to incubate in captivity.
A shell-less system gives conservationists something they've never had:
👉 A window into the embryo. In real time.
Scientists could finally watch:
For 200+ million years, birds used the same design.
One shell. One shot.
Colossal just proved that design can be swapped.
This won't save every endangered bird.
It won't resurrect the moa tomorrow.
But it's a new tool in a toolkit that has looked painfully thin for decades.
Sometimes breakthroughs arrive with rockets and thunder.
And sometimes…
they arrive as a tiny chick, breaking out of an egg that was never supposed to exist.
That's all for now!
