Society · De-Extinction · May 19, 2026Breaking

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Twenty-Six Chicks, One $10B Startup — and the Egg Scientists Say Isn’t Really an Egg.

The 30-second summary — May 19, 2026

Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based de-extinction company valued at $10.32 billion, announced today that it has hatched 26 healthy domestic-chicken chicks from a 3D-printed, silicone-coated artificial eggshell.

How it works: a 3D-printed lattice in the shape of an egg, coated with a semi-permeable silicone membrane that exchanges oxygen the way a real shell does. Fertilized chicken embryos are placed inside, calcium is added externally (the eggshell itself normally supplies it), and the embryos develop in an incubator.

Why the company built it: as a stepping stone toward resurrecting the South Island giant moa — the extinct 12-foot-tall flightless New Zealand bird whose eggs are roughly 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be unlayable by any living surrogate. The same platform applies to dodo work. Colossal’s separate woolly-mammoth program targets a 2028 rewild.

The pushback. Four named scientists at three separate institutions called the “artificial egg” framing an overstatement. The system, they argue, is an artificial eggshell — the egg’s nutrient delivery system, waste handling, and temporary embryonic organs all come from the real fertilized embryo poured in. Quote, verbatim: “That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell.”

The investors. Colossal’s ~$615M raised to date includes funding from Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, Peter Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Thomas Tull, and Victor Vescovo, alongside conventional VC. The $10B+ valuation makes Colossal one of the largest privately-held biotech companies in the United States.

Colossal Biosciences — the Texas-based, $10.32-billion-valued de-extinction startup that has spent four years promising to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the Tasmanian tiger — said today that it has hatched twenty-six healthy domestic chicksfrom a custom-engineered, 3D-printed eggshell. It is, by the company’s framing, the first time live birds have been hatched from a fully artificial vessel of this design.

The vessel itself is, by the published technical description, a 3D-printed plastic lattice shaped like an egg and coated with a silicone-based semi-permeable membrane that lets oxygen in and water vapor out, the way a calcium-carbonate shell would. To run the experiment, Colossal scientists poured fertilized chicken embryos into the lattice, supplemented the system with externally-added calcium (which a real shell would supply on its own), and watched the embryos develop in real time inside an incubator. Chief Biology Officer Andrew Pasktold reporters: “To see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind blowing. You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb.”

Four named scientists at three separate institutions responded the same day that “artificial egg” oversells what was demonstrated. Helen Sang, of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh — the institution that cloned Dolly the sheep — told MIT Technology Review there are still “significant challenges to overcome to grow an embryo of a different species in artificial eggs.” Katsuya Obara of the University of Tsukuba called the framing “clearly an overstatement” and described the technology as “essentially a modification of existing methods.” The AP-syndicated wire copy carries an even sharper formulation from the developmental biologist Lynch: “That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell.”

Stripped to its mechanical claim, the experiment is straightforward. The team:

• 3D-printed an egg-shaped lattice — a plastic skeleton in the dimensions of a chicken egg, open enough to admit gases through the membrane that coats it.
• Coated the lattice with a silicone-based semi-permeable membrane tuned to admit oxygen and release water vapor the way a calcium-carbonate shell does — a single function of the dozens an eggshell normally performs.
• Poured fertilized chicken embryos into the system — the embryos were not synthesized; they were taken from real laid chicken eggs.
• Supplemented the system with externally-added calcium, which the shell of a real egg normally absorbs into the embryo over the course of development.
• Incubated under standard chicken-incubation conditions and imaged the embryos’ development in real time — a side benefit, since a real eggshell is opaque and the silicone is partially transparent.
• Hatched 26 healthy chicks ranging in age from a few days to several months old at the time of the announcement.

The visible-incubation feature is the underrated detail. Real chicken-egg development inside a calcium shell is, from outside, a black box; you wait three weeks and either a chick comes out or it doesn’t. The lattice/silicone system makes the entire embryonic-development sequence externally observable, which is a useful research instrument even if no extinct species is ever resurrected through it. Whether it is, as Colossal frames it, the “first artificial egg” depends on what you count as an egg.

An egg, as scientists are quick to point out, is not just a container. A real chicken egg is also: a calcium reservoir, a yolk-based nutrient delivery system, a temporary set of embryonic membranes (the amnion, chorion, allantois, yolk sac) that handle waste disposal and respiration, a graded protein matrix that absorbs mechanical shock, and a hormonal signaling environment. Colossal’s system replicates one of those functions — oxygen exchange — and supplements one more (calcium) externally. The other functions are provided by the real embryo that gets poured in.

“That's not an artificial egg because you've poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It's an artificial eggshell.”

Lynch, developmental biologist — quoted by the Associated Press

Helen Sang at the Roslin Institute — whose institution’s 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep is the canonical reference point for “biotech announcement that turned out to be more limited than it sounded” — flagged the same-species caveat: this hatch was a chicken in a chicken-sized vessel using a chicken embryo. Extending the system to a different species (the moa is a chicken’s very distant cousin) is, in her words, “significant challenges to overcome.” Katsuya Obara at the University of Tsukuba was sharper: “clearly an overstatement… essentially a modification of existing methods.” Nicola Hemmingsat Sheffield was the bluntest: “Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new.”

None of those scientists called the experiment fraudulent. The point is more delicate: a 3D-printed, silicone-coated incubation chamber that admits oxygen and lets you watch a chick develop is a real piece of engineering and a real research instrument. It is not, on its own, a substitute for an egg.

Colossal’s answer to “why bother engineering an eggshell from scratch” is the South Island giant moa. The moa is the flightless, wingless New Zealand bird that went extinct around 1440 CE, hunted out by the early Māori within roughly a century of human arrival on the islands. The largest moa stood about 12 feet tall. Its eggs, according to fossil-record estimates, were roughly 80 times the volume of a chicken’s egg— large enough that no living surrogate bird (the closest living relative is the South American tinamou, a much smaller flightless bird) could physically lay one.

If you want to bring back a moa, you cannot use a tinamou as a surrogate; the egg won’t fit. You either engineer a much-larger living surrogate (a moonshot inside a moonshot) or you engineer a synthetic vessel that can grow the embryo to term outside any bird. The 3D-printed silicone egg announced today is, in Colossal’s framing, the proof-of-concept for the second path. The company has not claimed a moa-sized version exists yet. Engineering one will be considerably harder than scaling up the chicken-sized version — a different species’ embryonic biology, a different gas-exchange profile, different nutrient requirements over a much longer incubation period.

The same engineering thread runs through Colossal’s dodoprogram (the dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, also much smaller; same surrogate problem at lower scale). It does not directly apply to the woolly-mammoth program, which uses an Asian-elephant surrogate that is 99.6% genetically similar and biologically compatible — that target remains a 2028-rewild goal.

Colossal is, in dollar terms, one of the most heavily capitalized private biotech companies in the United States. The company has raised roughly $615 million across multiple rounds, including a $200M Series C in January 2025 at a $10.2 billion valuation (TechCrunch) and a $120M follow-on in September 2025 (D Magazine). As of March 2026, D Magazine’s reporting puts the cumulative valuation at $10.32 billion. The cap table is unusual: alongside conventional venture capital, the named outside investors include actor Chris Hemsworth, director Peter Jackson, NFL quarterback Tom Brady, hotel heiress Paris Hilton, deep-sea-exploration financier Victor Vescovo, and film producer Thomas Tull.

Whether $615M is “a lot” depends on the comparison. It is roughly twice the announced first-round of any private cell-therapy company in the United States this decade. It is a small fraction of the capital that has gone into single-issue mRNA-platform companies (Moderna and BioNTech raised in the multi-billions before COVID). What the figure unambiguously shows is that there is enough patient capital chasing the de-extinction thesis to fund engineering work whose horizon is measured in decades, not quarters.

Three takeaways for a reader trying to decide how much of this matters:

• The science, narrowly: a working 3D-printed silicone incubation chamber that admits oxygen and lets a chicken embryo develop visibly to term is genuine engineering. It will be useful for embryology research independent of any de-extinction goal — you can watch a vertebrate develop from outside the shell now.
• The marketing, broadly: calling it an “artificial egg” rather than an “artificial eggshell with externally-supplied calcium and an externally-supplied embryo” is a stretch that four named scientists at three institutions flagged on Day One. Civic-literacy point: a $10B private-biotech company has every incentive to maximize the framing of any technical milestone, and the science press is doing its job by labeling that framing in real time.
• The de-extinction project: the chick-sized vessel does not, by itself, mean a moa is coming. Scaling to an 80-times-larger egg, a different species’ embryonic biology, and a longer incubation period are each separate problems that Colossal has not solved and has not claimed to have solved. The mammoth path (which uses a real Asian-elephant surrogate, not an artificial vessel) remains the company’s nearest-term de-extinction target, on a 2028 timeline.

Twenty-six chicks hatched is, on its own, a real piece of news. The 12-foot moa is not. Both can be true at the same time.

Three pieces of long-form on-camera record give the clearest sense of how Colossal frames its own work — including the artificial-egg / artificial-womb program the May 19 chick hatch sits inside. The Diamandis “Moonshots” episodes are the company’s most-cited public discussions of the artificial-womb roadmap; the Sabrina Halper interview is the cleanest stand-alone Lamm explainer of de-extinction strategy.

Colossal’s own X account (verified, @colossal) carried the moa-de-extinction program announcement that the May 19 chick hatch directly serves. The two posts below are the company’s primary-source framing of the long-arc goal:

We searched Truth Social for on-topic posts on the Colossal artificial-egg announcement and for the broader de-extinction program. We did not surface posts from President Trump, the Colossal cap-table principals (Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Peter Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Thomas Tull, Victor Vescovo), or named Colossal scientists. This is, on its face, a science story without a Truth Social political dimension as of publication. Two paraphrased on-topic Truth Social cards below represent the broader American-biotech-leadership context the story sits inside — not direct on-the-record statements about the chick hatch.