Long-extinct woolly mammoth will be brought back — within just 4 years, entrepreneur claims

This could get hairy.

A high-tech company is confident that extinct beasts as far back as the ice age — like the woolly mammoth — can be resurrected by 2028, all thanks to a bankroll by Hollywood A-listers like Paris Hilton and Chris Hemsworth.

Start-up Colossal Biosciences, which bills itself as “the world’s first de-extinction company,” is developing a way to revive “core” genes from longtime extinct animals including the mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, The Independent reported .

The Texas-based business has raised upward of $235 million from its celebrity backers like motivational speaker Tony Robbins and PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel — plus, in a wild twist, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , according to The Intercept.

Its CEO, Ben Lamm, likened the process to a “reverse Jurassic Park” in an interview with the Daily Mail .

“We have set a date of late 2028 for our first mammoth and we are on track for that currently, which is great,” Lamm told the Independent, noting that reviving the prehistoric giant requires a 22-month gestation.

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“But given the other species have much shorter gestation, it is highly likely that we will see another species before the mammoth.”

To that end, the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in the early 1980s, would take “just weeks” to revive, and the dodo bird, last seen in the 1600s, would require about one month, according to the bio boss.

“I do believe that it is highly likely we will have a species before 2028, and it will be one of the three that you’re looking at,” he added.

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Although the mammoth went extinct roughly 4,000 years ago, the big beast — weighing 6 tons — shares 99.5% of its genes with the Asian elephant. Gene editing and stem cells would be fused with an Asian elephant egg from a healthy female of the species.

“We’re not taking mammoth DNA and plugging in the holes,” Lamm told the Daily Mail, alluding to the disastrous process depicted in Michael Crichton’s 1990 sci-fi novel “Jurassic Park” and the subsequent film franchise. “We’re trying to engineer the lost genes from mammoths into Asian elephants.”

The company specifies that the resurrection would be “more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth,” according to a statement on its site .

“It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.”

Plus, if the creature were to return to arctic environments, the species could be an asset for the environment, the company claimed.

“It could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the arctic’s permafrost,” according to Colossal, which stressed that the ground layer is “one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.”

“Bringing back the woolly mammoth means bringing back a better Earth.”

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However, as Colossal touts the potential to bring back the dodo and other long-gone animals, academics have called the idea theater.

“De-extinction is a fairytale science,” Jeremy Austin, director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2022 . “Mammoth de-extinction is more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science.”

But Lamm won’t let his dreams die out over skepticism.

“Critics who say de-extinction of genes to create proxy species is impossible are critics who are simply not fully informed and do not know the science,” he told The Intercept at the time.

“We have been clear from day one that on the path to de-extinction we will be developing technologies which we hope to be beneficial to both human healthcare as well as conservation.”

Earlier this week, Colossal Biosciences announced it has formed a nonprofit foundation to focus on “conservation initiatives.”

The initiative would use the company’s technologies to “revolutionize wildlife conservation and ecosystem restoration, quickly,” according to a statement.

Partnerships with outside organizations “will focus on species that can benefit from genetic rescue, biobanking, and the creation and use of reference genomes. Additional focus will be on accelerating species adaptation, creating genetic resilience through biotechnology, finding lost species, and utilizing technological advancements including A.I., machine learning, and computational biology to enhance our understanding of animal behavior and ecosystems.”

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