Scientists discuss new habitats for mammoth revival

Telegraph

08-03-2025

When scientists first mooted the idea of bringing back the mammoth, it was met with raised eyebrows and widespread incredulity among the scientific community.
Now, with the creation of the first ' woolly mice ', the unthinkable might soon become a reality.
On Tuesday, scientists at Colossal, the US biotech start-up, announced they had engineered mice with golden shaggy fur and the ability to withstand the cold, in a test run to see if the traits could be transferred successfully to mammals.
The company is now so confident it can bring back the mammoth in the next few years, that it is already in talks with governments across the world to find a suitable habitat for the creatures to roam.
Dr Beth Shapiro, the chief science officer at Colossal, said: 'The ultimate goal is to have these animals live in the wild somewhere.
'We've been talking to several different state governments and national governments about where they might go for the early stages.
'We need to have animals in an environment where we can very carefully watch them, make sure that they're healthy for some time, before they are actually released into the wild.
'We're still early in the stages of figuring out exactly where they will go. They lived throughout the central part of North America, even into Mexico.
'They don't necessarily need to be in the Arctic, although if we make them cold tolerant, then probably they'll be happiest somewhere colder.'
Colossal also wants to resurrect the dodo, which it intends to rewild on Mauritius, the original home of the flightless bird that was hunted to extinction in the 17th century. Discussions are ongoing with the Mauritian government.
Dr Shapiro, an evolutionary molecular biologist, joined Colossal in 2024 from the University of California, where her team was the first to sequence the dodo from a specimen in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
'I did my PhD at Oxford, and I would walk by that dodo sample every day when I was going to our ancient DNA lab,' she added.
'Eventually I got permission to take a sample and figured out that a dodo is a type of pigeon and its closest living relative is something called a Nicobar pigeon, which is a really beautiful bird.
'We're trying to identify what DNA sequences we need to change if we're going to take a Nicobar pigeon and turn it into a flightless, big headed, pretty freaking cool dodo.
'But we're also working with government and nonprofit organisations on Mauritius to develop plans for rewilding, because one of the things that we need to do with a dodo is have a safe place for it to be released into the wild.'
Birds are trickier to bring back than mammals because they cannot be cloned. Instead, scientists need to come up with a different way of passing edits on to the next generation.
The technique they are working on involves using a needle to suck primordial germ cells – which will become sperm or eggs – from a developing Nicobar pigeon embryo so they can edit them with dodo genes in the lab.
The edited germ cells can then be put into a surrogate bird which does not make its own germ cells, and so will be then passed on to an embryo.
There is no date yet for resurrecting the dodo, but the mammoth may be just a few years away.
Mammoths share 99.5 per cent of their genes with Asian elephants, so bringing them back is largely a case of finding missing genetic traits linked to cold adaptation, such as long shaggy coats and fat storage.
The idea was first put forward by Harvard geneticist Professor George Church in 2008, who had become interested in attempts to sequence the mammoth genome by Swedish scientists.
The genome was finally fully sequenced in 2015 and in the same year Church's team successfully copied some woolly mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant.
At the time, Church predicted that the animal could be resurrected by the end of the decade, however progress stalled until he founded Colossal in 2021 with entrepreneur Ben Lamm, which has brought millions of dollars of investment.
Dr Shapiro said: 'When the company was launched, they said they hoped to see the first mammoth in 2028, and I think our team is on track to be able to create cells and embryos by 2027 sometime.
'After that, we have a 22 month gestation period, and that's just a lot of stuff that could happen that's completely out of our control. There are a lot of unknowns in there, and some of it is just biology. And biology is hard.'
The woolly mice success paves the way for multiple genetic traits to be introduced to Asian elephant DNA, and resurrect the mammoth, which died out around 10,000 years ago.
'We put all the genetic edits together for the first time which is something that we're going to have to do if we want to change an elephant genome into a mammoth genome, or a Nicobar pigeon genome into a dodo genome,' said Dr Shapiro.
'We've confirmed our hypotheses that these are the genes that we want to target for the mammoth project.'
Elephants have a 22 month gestation, and it takes another more than a decade to reach sexual maturity, so it is not feasible to test genetic edits out on real animals until scientists are sure they will work. They are also an endangered species.
Mice, on the other hand, have a 20 days gestation, so researchers can tell quickly if their work has been a success. But the mice are still well looked after.
'We didn't just go ahead and shove mammoth genes into a mouse,' added Dr Shapiro. 'We know these genes have been studied in the past and are associated with healthy mice that can live and thrive in a normal environment.
'They're well treated. At Colossal, they have these cute little runs and wooden houses that they can hide in and things like that. Ben really likes them, so they get superstar treatment.'
While the mammoth and dodo might get all the attention, the team is also working on resurrecting the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) and has future plans to bring back a giant bear from the Ice Age and a five foot tall beaver.
Although bringing back animals from extinction has echoes of Jurassic Park, the team at Colossal hope that the techniques they are pioneering could uncover lost genetic traits from the past and ensure that no species alive today need ever go permanently extinct.
The company has also been focusing on endangered animals such as the vaquita, a porpoise which is also one of the most threatened marine species on the planet, the northern white rhino, which is on the brink of extinction, and the pink pigeon, a rare species found in Mauritius.
And resurrecting the mammoth might also save the elephant.
Dr Shapiro added: 'If we create elephants that are able to live in habitats outside of their natural zone, by making them better adapted to living in cold places, then this means that we can have more habitats that we might be able to protect, that are available to elephants as well.'