A biotech company chasing de-extinction says it has hatched 26 live chicks in an artificial environment, and scientists are split on what that actually means.

Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday the baby chickens, ranging from a few days to several months old, were born from a 3D-printed lattice structure designed to mimic an eggshell.

The company has previously said it genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves.

Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically tweak living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa. He said moa eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken egg and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.

“We wanted to build something that nature has done a pretty good job of developing and make it better and scalable and even more efficient,” Lamm said.

To hatch the chicks, Colossal scientists poured fertilized eggs into the artificial system and placed them in an incubator. They also added calcium, which is normally absorbed from the eggshell, and imaged the embryos’ development and growth in real time.

Scientists say Colossal designed an artificial eggshell with a membrane that lets in the right amount of oxygen, like a real egg. But other parts of an egg, including temporary organs that nourish and stabilize the growing chick and remove waste, were not included.

“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,” said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo.

Lynch said the company might be able to use the technology to help make a genetically modified bird, but not a moa.

“They might be able to use this technology to help them make a genetically modified bird, but that’s just a genetically modified bird. It’s not a moa,” Lynch said.

Researchers have used older technology in past decades to create transparent eggshells that hatched chicks from plastic films or sacks. Scientists say those methods can help them study chicken development and gather insights that can also apply to other mammals and humans.

“Producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield and is not part of the Colossal team.

Lamm said the company is still far from trying to resurrect a moa with the artificial egg system. Scientists would first need to compare ancient DNA from well-preserved moa bones with the genomes of living bird species. They would also need a bigger eggshell.

“We didn’t want to wait till we were ready to birth a giant moa. We actually wanted to start working on the engineering challenges for surrogacy and birth now,” Lamm said.

Some scientists also question what would happen if Colossal does create a tall bird similar to the moa.

“The big challenge is, what environment is this animal going to live in?” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist with New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Hemmings said de-extinction work may make more sense for endangered species living today, because scientists could preserve sperm and egg cells from living animals and try to bring more back.

“My personal interests lie more in preserving what we’ve got than trying to bring back what is already gone,” Hemmings said.

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