Peter Jackson, Maoris, Colossal To De-Extinct World’s Largest Bird

The giant moa was the world’s largest bird, up to 11 feet high and 500 lbs., a peaceable, plant-eating giant that lived on the edges of forests in New Zealand’s South Island. Then the island’s first human settlers, Polynesian peoples from the South Pacific, arrived in the late 1200s. Within 150 years, the Moa was gone, hunted to extinction.

Now, Maori descendants of those long-ago Polynesian settlers are trying to bring the giant moa and eight smaller moa species back. They’re partnering with Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit) and Colossal Biosciences, the Texas genetic engineering company that already scored a Hollywood-esque public relations coup alongside investor George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) with its de-extinction work on North America’s dire wolf, culminating late last year with the birth of three pups from two litters carried by domestic hound dogs.

Now, the Ngai Tahu Research Centre at the South Island’s University of Canterbury will lead research to de-extinct the giant moa on behalf of the South Island Maori iwi (tribe) of the same name, working with technologies and support from Colossal, in which Jackson is an investor.

The centre will also collect related genetic material from eight smaller Moa species, some of which were small as a turkey, said centre Director Mike Stevens, a Ngai Tahu iwi member. The material will be safeguarded in banks of vital biological information about an island whose remoteness and size have made it one of the planet’s more biodiverse places.

Stevens said the island-hopping Polynesians who landed in New Zealand depended on the moa as one of their very few sources of protein in that era, as well as a source of bones for toolmaking and other daily needs. The moa’s passing and the arrival of the Little Ice Age pushed those proto-Maoris to the more temperate North Island, leading to what evolved into the Maori culture of modern times.

Now, three decades after a landmark land settlement with the New Zealand government, the Maoris have shifted “from a place of grievance to a place of growth,” Stevens said. “This is part of our dream, and we’re partnering with people who share a similar dream for slightly different reasons, but they overlap.”

That definitely includes Jackson, whose British parents settled in the country before his birth.

“I’m a new New Zealander, but I’m a very proud one,” said Jackson. “Ever since I can remember, the moa has been a very proud part of what I consider to be the New Zealand story, because it was the biggest bird ever, the tallest bird that ever existed. And New Zealand, just being what we are, we always love it when we’re bigger or better than anything else. And so when you’re a New Zealand school kid, the fact that we used to have the biggest bird in the world is pretty exciting. And then you get older, and you go to museums, and you see the skeletons, you start to realize how much it’s in the New Zealand psyche, the New Zealand culture.”

As one example of that oversized place, Jackson pointed out that New Zealand military troops wore a moa patch on their uniforms when they went off top fight World War I.

“It’s always been part of our zeitgeist as a nation,” Jackson said. “But it’s obviously a creature that nobody alive today has ever seen. So it’s always been that elusive (feeling of), ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it be incredible if we knew what they were really like? What was it actually like to be in the company of one?’ That’s such an awe-inspiring idea that I hope it happens as soon as possible.”

Peter Scofield, a University of Canterbury professor who is one of the world experts on the giant moa, called the species “pretty odd,” with the males half the size of the females, and charged with providing all the chick rearing needed to sustain the species.

“Their impact, their differential impact, on the New Zealand forest, is something that we’re also going to learn about,” Scofield said. “We’ve theorized about it for more than 150 years, but this is sort of like experimentation on a grand scale. We’re going to learn far more about prehistoric animals in the prehistoric environment than we could ever have imagined.”

The proto-Maori early settlers probably used fire to flush the moa out of the forest onto grasslands where they could be hunted, Stevens said. That process changed the South Island landscape in ways that the sub-tropical forests still haven’t recovered from.

But importantly, Stevens said, that communal hunting process probably also helped transform the Polynesian island hoppers into the fierce, fortress-building Maori culture of a few centuries later that had to deal with constricted resources while creating far more detailed accountings of who owned what.

“I think if we get to understand this bird more, we think we will understand ourselves more,” Stevens said simply of the project’s meaning for Maori culture.

De-extincting birds is a different process biologically than dealing with mammals such as the dire wolf, Lamm acknowledged, though Colossal is already working with Australian academics to preserve a number of endangered bird species there.

And none of it is like what’s seen the long string of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, including one released this past weekend, that focus on reviving dinosaurs, giant reptiles, that have been extinct for tens of millions of years, instead of a few hundreds or thousands.

“We’ve never done a project in this structure before,” said Lamm, pointing to the lead role of the region’s indigenous people in guiding and running the research. “As we go along this journey, you know we look at us (Colossal) as a partner in a support vehicle for their vision of a right of return (for the moa), and potentially other species conservation work that the Ngai Tahu Research Centreand the tribe wants us to focus on.”

Jackson has a long history of technology-driven documentaries, including The Beatles: Get Back, the Emmy-winning 2021 resuscitation of dozens of hours of film of what became the band’s final album, Let It Be. He also directed a wildly different documentary, 2018’s They Shall Not Grow Old, reviving and modernizing century-old footage of the troops of several countries involved in World War I.

But Jackson demurred on doing any documentary work on the moa de-extinction project, saying Colossal already has a fine filmmaker, Michael Doherty, who is involved in that work and who indeed introduced Jackson to Lamm and Colossal originally.

“It’s nice to be working on something that you feel passionate about that’s nothing to do with filmmaking,” Jackson said. “It’s just a breath of fresh air. So I’d rather keep filmmaking away, as far as I’m concerned, from this project.”

Jackson’s Oscar-winning visual-effects company, Weta Workshop, has actually made a computer-generated version of the moa that walked around his post-production facilities. But that would be a wildly different experience than bringing back the moa in the real world.

But should the de-extinction work pan out as hoped, resulting birds won’t be released into the wild, Jackson and others hastened to add.

Instead, any de-extincted moas would be kept on an ecological preserve, isolated from the many threats of modern life, from cars on down. That’s similar to what has happened with the dire wolf pups, which have already doubled in size, according to recent reports, and live on a 2,000-acre enclave in North America whose location has not been publicly divulged.