When a tiny lizard turned up at the edge of a proposed housing development outside Melbourne in 2023, it was the first confirmed sighting of the Victorian Grassland Earless Dragon in more than 50 years. Scientists had largely concluded the species was gone. Instead, it was waiting. What happened next is a case study in what conservation can look like when the response moves as fast as the threat.
The Colossal Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Colossal Biosciences, moved quickly to support the response. Working with Zoos Victoria, the foundation helped fund interim quarantine housing at Melbourne Zoo, launched genome sequencing of the rediscovered population, and mapped the genetic relatedness of individual animals to guide a conservation breeding program.
The results, documented in the foundation’s 2025 Impact Report, are striking: from 39 wild individuals, the team established 11 breeding pairs and produced 81 dragon hatchlings, bringing the total number of animals held in new facilities to 135.
Building an Insurance Population Before It’s Too Late
The logic behind the dragon effort reflects a broader principle the Colossal Foundation applies across its portfolio: when a species drops below a viable threshold, the most urgent priority is creating a genetic insurance population before the window closes entirely.
The Victorian Grassland Earless Dragon is a species that matures within its first year and lives for fewer than two, making population swings rapid and potentially catastrophic. Without intervention, a single drought season or predator surge could erase what remains.
“Our partnership with Colossal has great potential to explore and apply more novel genetic techniques for a range of species in need,” said Dr. Jenny Gray, CEO of Zoos Victoria. “It’s a great example of how different organizations can collaborate to address the urgent need for species preservation and ecosystem restoration.”
The dragon work is part of a broader suite of rapid-response conservation projects the Colossal Foundation has launched in its inaugural year, which the Impact Report says spans more than 40 species across six continents. The common thread is early, decisive action with genetic and technological tools that many conservation organizations do not yet have access to.
Confirming a “Lost” Bird Half a World Away
A similar pattern played out across the Pacific. The tooth-billed pigeon is known in Samoa as the manumea and sometimes called the “little dodo” for its close genetic relation to that extinct bird. It was last photographed in 2013, and fewer than 100 are believed to survive. For a decade, field teams had searched without visual confirmation. The question was no longer whether the bird was rare. The question was whether it still existed at all.
Working with the Samoa Conservation Society, the IUCN SSC Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group, and BirdLife International, the Colossal Foundation’s AI team trained a machine-learning classifier on just five minutes of existing audio recordings to detect the pigeon’s distinctive call with 95% accuracy. On its first deployment in Samoa, the system registered the bird’s presence 43 times. The species had not been photographed in over 13 years, yet within weeks of deployment, field teams had acoustic confirmation it was still there. Colossal has since open-sourced the algorithm so other conservationists can apply it to additional lost or elusive bird species worldwide.
“The short story is that conservation needs powerful and committed allies,” said Matt James, Executive Director of the Colossal Foundation. “We are here to be that ally. There is no more time to wait to protect the species we have on Earth today if we want to make sure they are still here in 10, 50 and 500 years.”
A Replicable Model for Conservation at Speed
What connects these projects is not geography or taxonomy but approach. Colossal Biosciences built its reputation on the argument that genetic tools developed for de-extinction have immediate applications for species that are still here. The dragon hatchlings at Melbourne Zoo and the acoustic detections in a Samoan forest are evidence that the argument holds.
In both cases, the intervention came before the species crossed the threshold from critically endangered to functionally lost. That timing matters. An insurance population of 135 dragons gives conservation managers something to work with. A confirmed acoustic signature of the manumea gives field teams a target. Neither outcome was guaranteed. Both depended on moving faster than the extinction timeline.
Across its first year, the Colossal Foundation reports deploying over 20 frontier technologies in support of species recovery. The foundation’s 2025 Impact Report describes a conservation portfolio that spans earless dragons and acoustic classifiers, elephant vaccines and rewilding accelerators, genome sequencing and anti-toxin de-extinction technologies. The ambition is significant. So is the urgency driving it: species are going extinct 100 times faster than they did before humans.
The Victorian Grassland Earless Dragon spent 54 years unseen before someone nearly built a housing development on top of it. The manumea went unconfirmed for more than a decade while its forest habitat shrank. Both species are still here. Whether they remain so may depend on how many more organizations are willing to move at the pace these moments demand.
