4,000 years after its extinction, an ambitious project attempts to revive the woolly mammoth from extinction.
The last stocks of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) they disappeared from our planet about 4,000 years ago. With thick fur and tusks up to 4 meters long, the most iconic animal of the prehistoric megafauna experienced a gradual decline that began in the late Pleistocene and culminated approximately 1,700 years ago.
Now, a project promoted with an initial fund of 15 million dollars seeks revive the woolly mammoth from extinction and with it, reduce the effects of the climate emergency.
The plan of the American company Colossal Biosciences consists of modifying embryos of Asian elephants (their closest living relative) to obtain a hybrid with the phenotypic characteristics and behavior of a woolly mammoth.
The main scientific mind behind Colossal is George Church, Professor of Genetics and biologist at Harvard University, whose area of research in the last decade has been dedicated to delving into the genetic possibilities of reviving extinct species.
Although the details of the initiative are not yet clear, the key to Colossal’s titanic company is to bet on the CRISPR genetic scissors, a novel technique to edit the genome, which allows to fragment any DNA molecule and modify the language of life with extremely high precision.
Hence, strictly speaking, the biotechnological project will not create a mammoth identical to those that inhabited the Earth 10,000 years ago, but “a cold resistant elephant with all the fundamental biological features of the woolly mammoth. It will walk like a woolly mammoth, it will look like one, it will sound like one, but the most important thing will be that it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the extinction of the mammoth ”, explains Colossal.
According to Church, reviving the woolly mammoth (the most iconic species of prehistoric megafauna) would also bring with it environmental benefits:
The biologist assures that if the herds of mammoths once again dominate the Arctic and graze between the frozen tundra of Siberia and North America, the soil would stop melting thanks to the fertilization caused by their excrement, stopping the thaw partially, capturing carbon dioxide and avoiding methane emission derived from permafrost.
The presentation of the ambitious project also brought with it a ethical and ecological debate that the initiative will have to face in the near future, regarding the environmental implications that its reintroduction to the habitat that dominated thousands of years ago would bring and above all, the limits of genetics to revive a species that disappeared from the face of the Earth millennia ago.
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