Scientists are closer to bringing back the woolly mammoth with a scientific breakthrough
Woolly mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago, but scientists claim America will soon see the prehistoric animal in 2028.
Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotechnology and genetic engineering company, is on a mission to “extinct” the creature and other long-lost species.
The company announced it has raised $200 million in a new round of funding to make this a reality over the next three years. Since its launch in 2021, it has raised $435 million.
Scientists don’t know exactly why they disappeared from the planet, but theories include a changing climate, overhunting, or a combination of both.
But Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences has said he is “positive” the first woolly mammoth calves will be born in the coming years.
“Our recent successes in creating the technologies required for our end-to-end de-extinction toolkit have been received with enthusiasm by the investment community,” Lamm said in a statement.
“This funding will grow our team, support the development of new technology, expand our list of endangered species, while continuing to enable us to fulfill our mission to make extinction a thing of the past.”
Colossal, now valued at $10.2 billion, has already sequenced a mammoth genome and found a way to produce elephant stem cells that can give rise to different cell types – two important steps toward the mammoth’s resurrection.
Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences, says he is ‘positive’ that the first woolly mammoth calves will be born in late 2028
All that remains is the gene editing process to add the target mammoth genes to elephant DNA, the company said.
“We have set a timeline of late 2028 for the first mammoth calves and we are currently on track for that,” Lamm previously told DailyMail.com.
To understand how Colossal’s de-extinction process works, Lamm said you can think of it as “Jurassic Park in reverse.”
In the classic films, scientists bring back dinosaurs by recovering ancient DNA frozen in amber, then using genes from frogs to fill in the gaps in the dino DNA.
But unlike those fictional scientists, the researchers at Colossal Biosciences actually work backwards.
“We’re not taking DNA from mammoths and plugging in the holes, we’re trying to manipulate the lost genes of mammoths into Asian elephants,” Lamm said.
Asian elephants are more closely related to woolly mammoths than African elephants. They share 95 percent of their genetic code with the extinct giants.
By studying the differences between the genome of the Asian elephant and the genome of the woolly mammoth, Colossal scientists have identified “target genes” that essentially determine whether an organism becomes an elephant or a mammoth.

Ben Lamm (pictured) told DailyMail.com that you can think of his company’s de-extinction process as ‘reverse Jurassic Park’

De-extinction of mammoths combines genes from ancient mammoth DNA with DNA from an Asian elephant to create hybrid stem cells that can be used to create woolly mammoth embryos

Asian elephants share 95 percent of their DNA with woolly mammoths. The researchers think they can use this similarity to develop mammoth-elephant hybrids
Thanks to advances in gene editing techniques such as CRISPR, scientists can now plug these target genes directly into the DNA of modern elephants.
For example, they could take the ancient gene that causes mammoths to produce their woolly fur and inject it into the DNA of an Asian elephant.
“You can think of DNA as a twisted ladder, where each little rung is a base pair,” Lamm said.
“We are able to change every step of the ladder, but now we also have the ability to design new parts of the ladder that we want to be there.”
The resulting hybrid DNA from an elephant and a mammoth can then be used to create “pluripotent stem cells,” a type of cell that has the potential to become any type of tissue.
In theory, colossal scientists should be able to coax these cells into becoming sperm, eggs, or even viable embryos that contain the genetic programming to become a mammoth.
They then plan to implant these bioengineered embryos into female Asian elephants, which will term them to term and eventually give birth to woolly mammoth calves.
Colossal wants to do this with other extinct species, including the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger and the Pyrenean ibex.

The mammoth may not be the first creature to become extinct, as the Dodo and Tasmanian tiger reproduce much faster

Ben Lamm says the same technique will allow Colossal Biosciences to recover the Dodo (illustrated) and the Tasmanian Tiger

Lamm said his ultimate goal is to reintroduce self-sustaining, interbreeding populations of mammoths into the wild.
And because these species reproduce much faster than woolly mammoths, the world may see them come back to life before the tusked giants make their debut, Lamm said.
If Colossal is successful in bringing back the mammoth, the company plans to create genetically diverse, interbreedable herds that can establish sustainable populations in the wild.
“I consider all of these projects to be rewilding projects,” Lamm said.
As for where the mammoths will be reintroduced, Lamm said the company has had “some early conversations” with northern U.S. states, including Alaska, and with Canada about potential locations for woolly mammoth rewilding.
But bringing a long-extinct species into our modern environment comes with risks.
Introducing new species into the environment has the potential to disrupt the delicate balance of the ecosystem.
And because no one has ever reintroduced an extinct, ancient species into the wild, scientists aren’t sure what consequences this will have.

About 52,000 years ago, a woolly mammoth was freeze-dried by the weather just after it died, leaving its DNA in a glassy state. The specimen was excavated in northeastern Siberia in 2018, allowing scientists to analyze the skin tissue
When asked about these concerns, Lamm told DailyMail.com: “We need to have the data, and it needs to be carefully collected and measured.
“But at the end of the day, some of that is still modeling and I can’t in good conscience say that modeling by scientists who may or may not be affiliated with Colossal can give you 100 percent accuracy.”
Yet he emphasizes that he is not at all concerned about the risks of reintroducing large extinct mammals such as the mammoth.
“I think what we can do is look at proxies for our rewilding and see how they work,” he said, pointing to the reintroduction of bison in Yellowstone National Park and Britain as an example.
Research has shown that the reintroduction of native megafauna leads to a sustainable improvement in biodiversity.
Based on these encouraging results, Lamm believes that bringing back woolly mammoths will likely have a similarly positive impact.
“We are confident that a more diverse ecosystem is a better ecosystem overall,” he said.