Giant woolly mammoths last roamed the Earth around 4,000 years ago, but a group of de-extinction scientists say they plan to bring it back in 2028.
Colossal Biosciences, a US-based genetic engineering company, is behind the project to restore the prehistoric creature which is believed to have died out due to changes in the environment, DNA disorders and hunting by early humans.
The company announced it has raised $200 million (AED734 million) in a new round of funding to make the resurrection happen in the next three years.
Its mission statement reads: ‘Colossal’s landmark de-extinction project will be the resurrection of the woolly mammoth – or more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth.

‘It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.’
Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences, has said he is ‘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.
‘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.’
Rewilding Mammoths
Lamm said his eventual goal is to reintroduce self-sustaining, interbreeding populations of mammoths into the natural environment and added that the company has ‘had some early conversations’ with northern US states including Alaska, as well as Canada for potential woolly mammoth re-wilding sites.
Around 52,000 years ago, a woolly mammoth happened was frozen just after it died, preserving its DNA. The specimen was excavated in north eastern Siberia in 2018, allowing scientists to analyse its skin tissue.
Colossal 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 bringing back 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 added.
To understand how Colossal’s de-extinction process works, Lamm said you can think of it as ‘reverse Jurassic Park.’
In the 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.
The company also highlighted the environmental benefits of bringing back the mammoth – even saying the animals would help the battle against global warming.
Colossal stated: ‘The loss of these large cold-tolerant mammoths over the past 10,000 years has stripped this ecosystem of the grasslands that once efficiently absorbed carbon. Instead, there are mossy forests and wetlands, which aren’t as helpful with combating rising temperatures.
‘However, if the mammoth steppe ecosystem could be revived, it could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the arctic’s permafrost – one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.’
Colossal also aims to do this with other extinct species, including the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger and the Pyrenean ibex.
But bringing a long-extinct species into our modern-day environment comes with risks such as the potential to upset the delicate balance of the ecosystem.