Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

New Zealand’s Giant Moa stood over three meters tall but were easy prey

Researchers from New Zealand will try to revive extinct birds, with help from Colossal Biosciences and film-maker Sir Peter Jackson.

Readers may remember that Colossal Biosciences has created a “woolly” mouse by using genetic information gathered from woolly mammoths and elephants, a feat it hopes will help it to one day re-create the Woolly Mammoth.

Now the company has teamed with the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, an indigenous scholarship facility at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, to bring a bird called the “Moa” back to life.

The Moa went extinct in the 15th century. New Zealand is thought to have been the last major landmass to be occupied by humans, who upon arrival found no significant predators but many large and slow-moving birds that didn’t perceive people as a threat.

The early Polynesian settlers therefore found birds easy to hunt and cleared forests in which they lived. Rats that arrived with the first settlers quickly developed a taste for eggs.

Many New Zealand bird species did not survive.

But the Moa, and especially the Giant Moa that stood over three meters tall and were probably the biggest ever bird to walk the Earth, live on in the New Zealand imagination. The flightless creatures feature prominently in oral tradition of the Māori people and the biggest specimens exert a dinosaur-esque fascination for some Kiwi kids … and young-at-heart film director Jackson.

An AI rendering of the South Island Giant Moa - Click to enlarge

“When you’re a New Zealand school kid, the fact that we used to have the biggest bird in the world is pretty exciting. And then you get older, and you go to museums, and you see the skeletons, you start to realize how much it's in the New Zealand psyche, the New Zealand culture,” Jackson remarked to Forbes.

Colossal has already started work to sequence and rebuild the genomes for all nine moa species, using material gathered during recent expeditions to caves that contain “significant moa subfossil deposits”.

The project aims to resurrect the Moa and other extinct New Zealand species, and prepare potential habitats for them to live in. All involved acknowledge bringing the birds back to life may not be possible, but the project’s other scientific and cultural goals are felt to make the effort worthwhile even if the species isn’t revived. ®