Bioscience and genetics company Colossal raised a whopping $15 million to fund a project that would bring woolly mammoths back to the Arctic Tundra.
The ambitious project involves recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild. Scientists aim to create an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that would carry mammoth DNA. The goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant that looks and behaves like a mammoth. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the co-founders of Colossal, states that they “want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees.”
If the project succeeds, scientists hope to have their first set of ‘recreated mammoth’ calves in six years.
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Image credit: wikimedia commons; Revive & Restore/ The Guardian