[ad_1]
Extinction is typically for good. Once a species winks out, it survives only in memory and the fossil record. When it comes to the woolly mammoth, however, that rule has now been bent. It’s been 4,000 years since the eight-ton, 12-foot, elephant-like beast walked the Earth, but part of its DNA now operates inside several litters of four-inch, half-ounce mice created by scientists at the Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences. The mice don’t have their characteristic short, gray-brown coat, but rather the long, wavy, woolly hair of the mammoth and the extinct beast’s accelerated fat metabolism, which helped it survive Earth’s last ice age. Both traits are the result of sophisticated gene editing that Colossal’s scientists hope will result in the reappearance of the mammoth itself as early as 2028.
“The Colossal woolly mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said company CEO Ben Lamm in a statement. “By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we’ve proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create.”
Colossal has been working on restoring the mammoth ever since the company’s founding in 2021. The animal’s relatively recent extinction—just a few thousand years ago as opposed to the tens of millions that mark the end of the reign of the dinosaurs—and the fact that it roamed the far north, including the Arctic, means that its DNA has been preserved in multiple remains embedded in permafrost. For its de-extinction project, Colossal collected the genomes of nearly 60 of those recovered mammoths.
Recreating the species from that raw biological material is relatively straightforward in principle, if exceedingly painstaking in practice. The work involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth…
[ad_2]
