Woolly mammoths went extinct around 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 ‘de-extinct’ the creature and other long-lost species.
The company announced it has raised $200 million in a new round of funding to make it happen in the next three years. It has raised $435 million since launching in 2021.
Scientists aren’t exactly sure why they disappeared from the planet, but theories include a shifting climate, overhunting or a combination of both.
But Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences, has said he’s ‘positive’ the first woolly mammoth calves will be born in the next few years.
‘Our recent successes in creating the technologies necessary for our end-to-end de-extinction toolkit have been met with enthusiasm by the investor community,’ Lamm said in a statement.
‘This funding will grow our team, support new technology development, expand our de-extinction species list while continuing to allow us to carry forth 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 capable of giving rise to several different cell types — two important steps toward resurrecting the mammoth.
All that remains is the gene editing process to add the targeted mammoth genes into elephant DNA, according to the company.
‘We’ve set one timeline which is 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 ‘reverse Jurassic Park.’
In the classic films, scientists bring back dinosaurs by recovering ancient DNA frozen within amber, then using genes taken from frogs to patch the holes in the dino DNA.
But, unlike those fictional scientists, the researchers at Colossal Biosciences are actually working backward.
‘We’re not taking mammoth DNA and plugging in the holes, we’re trying to engineer the lost genes from 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 Asian elephant genome and the woolly mammoth genome, Colossal scientists have identified ‘target genes’ that essentially determine whether an organism becomes an elephant or a mammoth.
Thanks to advances in gene editing techniques like CRISPR, scientists can now take those target genes and plug them directly into the DNA of modern elephants.
For example, they can take the ancient gene that makes mammoths produce their woolly coats and inject it into an Asian elephant’s DNA.
‘You can think of DNA being like a twisted ladder with each little rung being a base pair,’ Lamm said.
‘We are able to change each rung of the ladder, but now we also have the ability to engineer new pieces of the ladder that we want to be there.’
The resulting elephant-mammoth hybrid DNA can then be used to create ‘pluripotent stem cells,’ a type of cell that has the potential to become any kind of tissue.
In theory, Colossal scientists should be able to coax these cells into becoming sperm, eggs, or even viable embryos containing the genetic programming to become a mammoth.
They then plan to implant these bioengineered embryos into female Asian elephants, who will carry them to term and eventually give birth to woolly mammoth calves.
Colossal aims to do this with other extinct species, including the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger and the Pyrenean ibex.
And because those species reproduce much faster than woolly mammoths, the world may see them come back to life before the tusked behemoths make their debut, according to Lamm.
If Colossal succeeds in bringing back the mammoth, the company then plans to create genetically diverse, interbreedable herds that could establish sustainable populations in the wild.
‘I see all these projects as rewilding projects,’ Lamm said.
As for where the mammoths will be reintroduced, Lamm said that the company has ‘had some early conversations’ with northern US states including Alaska, as well as Canada for potential woolly mammoth rewilding sites.
But bringing a long-extinct species into our modern-day environment comes with risks.
Introducing any new species into the environment has the potential to upset the delicate balance of the ecosystem.
And because no one has ever reintroduced an extinct, ancient species to the wild, scientists can’t be sure what consequences this will have.
When asked about these concerns, Lamm told DailyMail.com: ‘We have to have the data, and that has to be thoughtfully collected and measured.
‘But ultimately some of that is still modelling and I can’t, with a clear conscience, say that any modelling by scientists affiliated with Colossal or not can give you 100 percent accuracy.’
Still, he insists that he is not at all worried about the risks of reintroducing large extinct mammals like the mammoth.
‘I think that 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 the UK as examples.
Studies have found that reintroducing native megafauna leads to a sustained improvement in biodiversity.
Based on these encouraging results, Lamm says he believes bringing back woolly mammoths is likely to have a similarly positive effect.
‘We feel confident that, in general, a more diverse ecosystem is a better ecosystem,’ he said.
