Hieroglyphics have been drawn, fossils have been found, stories have been told, but the legend of woolly mammoths may not end there as we head toward the future. 

A Colossal Idea

After having been extinct for 10,000 years, woolly mammoths could potentially walk the Earth again. Bioscience and genetics company, Colossal, has raised $15 million to fund a woolly mammoth revival project. Scientists will look to engineer a set of elephant-mammoth hybrid embryos, a dream they hope to accomplish by 2027. 

Colossal was co-founded by Ben Lamm, a science and tech entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, known for pioneering new approaches to gene editing. Colossal is looking to engineer new embryos using mammoth DNA and skin cells from Asian elephants. 

Asian elephants, who are also at risk of extinction, are the closest animals related to mammoths. Scientists will take the skin cells of these elephants and reprogram them into more versatile stem cells. These new stem cells will then contain that mammoth DNA. The elephant-mammoth embryos will then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or artificial womb. Researchers are hoping to have the first set of calves within six years. 

Wonderous Potential

This tinkering could potentially have benefits on all fronts. Not just for us humans but the animals facing extinction and a world begging for an ice age would benefit as well. Scientists hope to conserve Asian elephants by giving them traits that will help them thrive in the Arctic. 

They believe introducing elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the habitat by knocking down trees and restoring the grasslands. Many scientists suspect that mammoths were vital for the thriving Arctic grasslands of the past. Mammoths practiced knocking down trees, digging up dirt, and fertilizing the soil all on their own. 

The other hand shows a more unknown future. If you’ve ever seen the film “Jurassic Park” you might remember Jeff Goldblum’s character bringing up theories about how life finds a way. He also mentions a chaos theory that is essentially the butterfly effect but his character was correct in the film. 

Spoiler alert! If you have not seen the film, the genetically engineered dinosaurs found a way to break free from their restraints. Not only do they took over the island of Jurassic Park, but even found a way to mate even though they were all females. 

Although the film is a fictional story, the themes suggest a lesson humans can learn from such gambles. The risks of Colossal’s project aren’t the ones we know of, rather the ones we do not.