{"id":237503,"date":"2026-05-20T18:06:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/chickens-hatch-from-worlds-first-artificial-eggs"},"modified":"2026-05-20T18:06:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:06:34","slug":"chickens-hatch-from-worlds-first-artificial-eggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/chickens-hatch-from-worlds-first-artificial-eggs","title":{"rendered":"Chickens Hatch From World\u2019s First Artificial Eggs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/chickens-hatch-from-worlds-first-artificial-eggs.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>On May 19, Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, which last year made headlines when it effectively de-extincted the dire wolf, announced that it had hatched a flock of 26 live chicks from fully artificial eggs. The technology behind the breakthrough can be later applied to bring back the dodo and New Zealand\u2019s giant, flightless moa\u2014both on Colossal\u2019s de-extinction \u2018to do\u2019 list\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2026Designing an artificial shell is not easy because a natural shell is deceptively complex. Made principally of calcium carbonate arranged in a crystalline structure, a typical egg shell is no more than 0.4 mm thick, and covered with up to 17,000 tiny pores to allow for gas exchange with the ambient atmosphere\u2014carbon dioxide out, and oxygen in. There are, too, a pair of slick inner membranes in the egg that perform another critical function, protecting the growing chick from invading bacteria. But those membranes have to be exceedingly thin\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2026The egg Colossal invented was very different. The inner membranes were made of vanishingly thin silicon using a proprietary technology that Colossal is planning to patent. The shell itself was only about two-thirds of a shell\u2014a titanium structure that resembles nothing so much as a soft-boiled-egg cup with its top missing, albeit with hundreds of hexagonal pores to allow for gas exchange. Once a few dozen of the titanium eggs were manufactured, Colossal gathered fertilized chicken eggs from an avian farm the company owns and operates and transported them to the lab. There, the scientists gently opened the top of the egg and transferred the yolk and the white and the tiny embryo onto the titanium egg cup and covered the cup with a transparent lid. The embryos were about three days past fertilization when they were transferred, meaning that they had 18 days remaining in their three-week incubation cycle.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018We place the egg into an incubator that controls the environment,\u2019 says Lambert. \u2018We then collect visual images at periodic milestones to understand how development is progressing.\u2019 When the incubation period was done, the chicks began \u2018pipping,\u2019 using their beaks to break through the membrane just the way an ordinary chick breaks through its shell. Eventually, the 26 chicks were moved to the same Texas farm from which their eggs were collected, where they can live out their five to 10 year lifespan.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The breakthrough could help bring giant birds back from extinction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On May 19, Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, which last year made headlines when it effectively de-extincted the dire wolf, announced that it had hatched a flock of 26 live chicks from fully artificial eggs. The technology behind the breakthrough can be later applied to bring back the dodo and New Zealand\u2019s giant, flightless moa\u2014both on Colossal\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-existential-risks","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}