Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson has committed US$15 million to Colossal Biosciences to help the Texas-based start-up attempt what it calls the “de-extinction” of New Zealand’s South Island giant moa, a flightless bird that stood about 12 feet (3.6 metres) tall before disappearing some 600 years ago. The investment, announced this week, also brings in the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre to represent Māori interests and cultural stewardship. Colossal plans to extract DNA from Jackson’s trove of roughly 300–400 moa bones and compare the sequences with living relatives such as the emu and tinamou. Researchers would then use CRISPR editing to re-engineer embryos—likely carried in large surrogate eggs—to create birds that resemble the extinct species. The approach builds on the company’s earlier effort that produced three gene-edited grey wolves marketed as ‘dire wolves.’ Outside scientists caution that avian reproduction poses far greater technical hurdles than mammalian cloning and say any resulting creature would be a genetic facsimile, not a true moa. Ecologists also question where a giant, unfamiliar bird could live, while several iwi argue that resources would be better directed toward protecting endangered species that still exist. Colossal and Jackson acknowledge the challenges but say the project could advance conservation genetics and rekindle interest in New Zealand’s ecological history.