Andrew Pask

Yeah, it is just like it sounds.

It is the process of bringing back extinct animals.

Well, the species that we're focused on at Colossal are ones that played critically important roles in ecosystems.

They were driven to extinction by us, by humans.

And we know that by bringing them back, it's not just, you know, undoing the wrong that we did, but also will stabilize those ecosystems so they can support, you know, hundreds of other species within them from also going extinct.

Yeah, I think, you know, all the ones that we're bringing back currently are species that lived in more contemporary times.

So within the last few hundred years.

And so for those, the environments really haven't changed that much.

In fact, they've become degraded because of the absence of those animals.

So putting them back into the landscapes will actually help repair a lot of the damage, not only to the animals, but also the plants and the landscape itself.

Yeah, so this has been a major breakthrough for us.

So we're working on a couple of extinct bird species, one of them being the dodo and the other one being the moa, which is a three metre tall bird species from New Zealand.

So the biggest bird that ever lived on Earth.

And in order to do a lot of this work, we have to be able to do things like genetic manipulation of bird embryos.

And that's really challenging because they develop inside an eggshell, which makes it really difficult.

And so what we've done is engineered this artificial egg, which really just enables them to develop exactly as they would inside the shell itself.

But in a vessel that's really accessible, we can actually see them going through the entire process of development.

And we can start to do real conservation biology now on birds for the first time, which has been something that's been lacking for a long time.

Yeah, definitely.

It's a fully artificial egg.