Colossal Biosciences

These horns never fall off. Ever.   Antelope horns aren’t like deer antlers. They’re permanent. Bone fused to the skull, wrapped in keratin, the same stuff as your fingernails.   And they just keep growing. For life.   Straight, spiral, corkscrew, or sword-like, every shape is built for a purpose. Fighting, flexing, surviving.   Nature didn’t make these for decoration. It engineered them for impact.

This is big egg energy. 🥚   An egg from the extinct South Island giant moa held around 80x the volume of an average chicken egg.   Which honestly tracks.   Out of the nine known species of moa, the South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus) stood tallest. With its neck fully extended, it could reach up to 12 feet (3.7 m) tall.   That’s taller than a basketball hoop backboard. Big bird. Big egg.   We’re working to de-extinct the moa, but there’s one major problem: no bird alive today is big enough to hatch an egg that size.   So we built an artificial egg.   👀 Check our profile to see it.   And follow for the updates.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Dallas' Colossal Biosciences has an answer. On Tuesday, the genetic engineering company best known for its efforts to resurrect extinct species like the dire wolf and woolly mammoth, announced it had successfully hatched chicks from a new artificial egg system that can incubate bird embryos without a natural shell. The 3D-printed device works by re-creating the environment provided by an eggshell while allowing for the exchange of gases critical for life. Natural eggshells are porous, letting developing chicks “breathe” by allowing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. Colossal’s system replicates that process through a silicone-based membrane lattice that regulates gas exchange at normal atmospheric levels. By Sasha Richie, Niamh Ordner https://lnkd.in/eDxC6VgF

A huge obstacle in bird de-extinction just cracked. We built an artificial egg.   Nature spent millions of years perfecting the original. We re-engineered one from scratch, and healthy chicks grew inside it.   Meet the Colossal artificial egg: a lattice frame and bioengineered membrane that breathes like a real egg. It’s largely transparent by design, so we can watch every stage of development from day one to hatch.   This is literally going to be huge. A South Island giant moa egg held roughly 80x the volume of a chicken egg. No bird alive today could hatch one. That’s a problem if you want to de-extinct one.   But this egg helps us overcome all that.   Wait for the hatch: https://lnkd.in/g4bHPRwU

🐣‼️BREAKTHROUGH: Colossal scientists just hatched healthy chicks from fully artificial eggs.   No shells. No hens. Just bioengineered eggs designed to breathe like the real thing.   And yeah… this could help bring back giant extinct (avian) dinosaurs.   Because we’re de-extincting the South Island giant moa, and its eggs were around 80x the volume of a chicken egg. 🤯 No bird alive today could hatch something that massive.   But the Colossal artificial egg can.   The future of bird conservation is getting wild.   You’re gonna want to see this.

This amazing zebra was recently spotted at Africa’s Kruger National Park.   This one lost a few stripes… and suddenly you might be wondering how much they matter.   Many scientists have proposed ideas about why zebras have stripes.   A few of the reasons might be to help confuse predators, repel biting flies, regulate heat, and even help zebras recognize each other.   There’s no single answer, but it may be one of nature’s coolest multi-tools.

🙌 Huge conservation news: Colossal CEO Ben Lamm just joined the Board of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the most influential conservation organization in the United States. Follow and support their amazing work National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

💙Six specimens. That’s it.   Everything we know about the extinct bluebuck comes from fragments. One of the great mysteries of African megafauna, gone by ~1800.   Now we reverse-engineer the past with DNA, specimens, and more.   We will crack it. We’ll bring back the blue. 💙