After dire wolf's return, Peter Jackson wants to bring back this New Zealand bird

USA Today

2 days ago

Peter Jackson is best known for directing and producing movies such as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films and "The Beatles: Get Back." Now, he's helping direct a project to resurrect long-extinct bird species in New Zealand.
An investor in Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences – the private firm that recently brought back a modern-day incarnation of the dire wolf and is working to de-extinct the woolly mammoth – Peter Jackson wanted to see if the biotech company might attempt to spread some of its magic in his home country.
"Why aren't you doing the moa, which is a thing that I really care about?" Jackson told USA TODAY he asked the genetics wizards at the company, referencing the species of flightless birds which were indigenous to New Zealand but went extinct about 600 years ago.
"I mean, the Tasmanian tiger ... and the mammoth's great, and everything else, but the moa is the thing that I was really passionate about," Jackson said. "And they said, 'sure we'd love to do it'."
What is a 'sprite'?: NASA astronaut captures rare phenomenon from 250 miles above Earth
Evidence of Jackson's passion about the moa: over the past 20 years or so, the filmmaker and his partner Fran Walsh had amassed a collection of more than 300 moa bones. As Jackson learned more about Colossal – DNA in ancient dire wolf bones helped create a dire wolf genome – he could envision the possible de-extinction of the moa.
'With the recent resurrection of the dire wolf, Colossal has also made real the possibility of bringing back lost species," Jackson said in a press release about the new project.
An advisor on the moa project, Jackson helped involve the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The centre – established in 2011 to support education for the Ngāi Tahu, the main Māori tribe of southern New Zealand – will direct the project, which also includes animal conservation efforts and the biobanking of other native species for preservation.
"Every decision we make along the way in the research and the de-extinction is being led by them and governed and supported by them," said Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal, which is also creating a New Zealand subsidiary of the company. "It's been massively rewarding, because it also affords us the ability to get so much deeper in the culture in a way that we've never even done when we worked with other indigenous groups around the world."
What animal is Colossal looking to bring back next?
The South Island Giant Moa, so named because it was indigenous to New Zealand's south island. While there were nine distinct species of the wingless moa – including birds the size of turkeys – the South Island Giant Moa stood out, approaching 12 feet tall with its neck outstretched.
Considered the world's tallest bird before it went extinct, "it's part of a family of large birds that once inhabited our ancestral tribal territories," said Kyle Davis, a Ngāi Tahu archaeologist who has helped search for moa fossils as part of the project.
The Giant Moa was "gigantic," weighing up to 250 kilograms (550 pounds), Paul Scofield, an moa expert and advisor on the project, told USA TODAY. "It was heavily covered in feathers from the head and even down the legs. It had really very massive feet, far more massive than any bird," said Stevens, the senior curator of natural history at Canterbury Museum, which has the world's largest collection of moa bones.
A kick from the moa could be deadly, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, which noted the moa fed on seeds, fruits, leaves, and grasses, and laid one large egg of up to 7 inches in diameter.
Experts say there were about 150,000 of the tall birds when the Polynesian settlers came to south New Zealand. Within about 150 years, they were extinct, said Mike Stevens, the director of the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, in the press release.
'During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, moa provided meat for sustenance, and bones and feathers for tools and decoration," especially in Te Wāhipounamu (the official Māori name for southwest New Zealand), he said.
The Giant Moa remains a symbol for the people of the south island and its potential resurrection fits within the country's many ongoing conservation efforts including the protection and resurgence of the kākāpō, a flightless parrot.
Research into de-extinction of the moa will likely shed light on New Zealand's ecological past. "It's really going to answer so many questions about prehistoric New Zealand," Scofield said. "Every single thing we discover about this amazing animal is really going to help flesh out what New Zealand was before humans arrived."
So far, Colossal has created a genome of the tinamou, thought to be the closest living relative of the moa.
While there's a lot of work ahead, Jackson envisions a natural environment for the Giant Moa to roam when it returns, he said in a promotional video about the project. "We're now at the point where being extinct isn't really the end of the story."
Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY's Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & [e-mail]
What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day