Bringing Back the Wolly Mammoth
The long extinct species of Wolly Mammoth is set to return in the Artic Tundra region. Millions rised to fund the project incorporated by a Start-up BIO-TECH Company.
The woolly mammoth emerged as a leading candidate for this work. It is being attempted because a close relative of the mammoth is still living — the Asian elephant. The genes of woolly mammoth traits can be edited into the Asian elephant genome, and the combination brought to life as an elephant cousin, once again adapted to the conditions of the far north.
The animal will be genetically resurrected using the recovered DNA. The reality of ‘JURASSIC PARK’ films is closer.
Flush with a $15 million infusion of funding, Harvard University genetics professor George Church, known for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, hopes the company COLOSSAL can usher in an era when mammoths “walk the Arctic tundra again.” He and other researchers also hope that a revived species can play a role in combating climate change.
The idea behind Colossal first emerged into public view in 2013, when Dr. Church sketched it out in a talk at the National Geographic Society. Dr. Church, who is best known for inventing ways of reading and editing DNA, wondered if he could effectively revive an extinct species by rewriting the genes of a living relative. Because Asian elephants and mammoths share a common ancestor that lived about six million years ago, Dr. Church thought it might be possible to modify the genome of an elephant to produce something that would look and act like a mammoth. Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings.
Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
The ultimate goal of the Woolly Mammoth Revival is to bring back this extinct species so that healthy herds may one day re-populate vast tracts of tundra and boreal forest in Eurasia and North America. The intent is not to make perfect copies of extinct woolly mammoths, but to focus on the mammoth adaptations needed for Asian elephants to thrive in the cold climate of the Arctic.
