Here we go again.

With the enthusiastic support of “Lord of the Rings” filmmaker Peter Jackson, Colossal Biosciences has now set its sights on resurrecting the extinct giant moa of New Zealand. There’s just one problem: Whatever they manage to do, it won’t be a moa. And the fact that they will be trying their DNA tricks with a bird this time presents new problems. 

Colossal Biosciences sets its sights on the moa—the towering flightless bird of New Zealand—as its next de‑extinction milestone. Standing up to 12 feet tall, the moa vanished nearly 600 years ago. With support from Ngāi Tahu and Peter Jackson, Colossal will reconstruct a moa genome using DNA from well‑preserved bone samples and gene editing in a related species such as emu.

There’s the first problem: The emu is only distantly related to the giant moa. Both birds are members of the infraclass Palaeognathae, which includes five orders of birds, including the ratites, which include the flightless rheas, ostriches, cassowaries, and emus, as well as the tinamous of Latin America, which can fly. The moas, though, were members of the order Dinornithiformes, while emus are in the order Casuariiformes. In other words, they are not particularly closely related.

Remember the whole dire wolf “de-extinction” thing? Same kind of problems here. The pups produced weren’t dire wolves. They were genetically modified gray wolves. And the dire wolf is a member of the same subtribe as the gray wolf, the Canini. The emu and moa are connected at the infraclass level, several cladistic levels higher. So, a considerably more distant relation than dire wolf/gray wolf.