A U.S. company says it plans to bring the woolly mammoth back by 2028

A Texas biotechnology company has staked its reputation on a goal that sounds like science fiction: producing a living animal that carries the defining traits of the woolly mammoth, an Ice Age giant that vanished thousands of years ago. The company has publicly set a target of the end of the decade and backs the claim with genetic work, a growing bank of ancient DNA, and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Whether the result would be a true mammoth or an engineered stand-in is a question that runs to the heart of what the effort actually promises.

The ambition has drawn both excitement and skepticism from geneticists, conservationists, and ethicists, because it forces a hard look at what de-extinction really means. The company frames its plan as a concrete engineering timeline, while critics note that recreating an extinct species is not the same as editing a few traits into a living relative.

Colossal Biosciences and its 2028 target

The company behind the effort is Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, and it describes itself as the world’s first de-extinction enterprise. Its stated aim is to create mammoth-like embryos and produce the first calves before the end of the decade, a timeline the company lays out on its own mammoth project page. That public target is the source of the widely repeated 2028 figure, and it functions as much as a statement of intent as a firm scientific prediction.

Reaching that goal on schedule would require a chain of technical steps to line up, from finalizing the genetic edits to establishing viable pregnancies. Independent observers have noted that the company continues to describe the mammoth as on track for 2028 even as the broader conversation around de-extinction shifts, a framing explored by Den of Geek. The timeline is aggressive by the standards of reproductive biology, which is part of why it draws scrutiny.

How the science actually works

Colossal is not attempting to clone a frozen mammoth from intact cells, which no one has been able to do. Instead, its scientists compare mammoth DNA with that of the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and target the genes responsible for classic mammoth traits such as shaggy fur, small ears, cold-adapted fat, and blood proteins that function at low temperatures. The plan is to edit those traits into elephant cells and, ultimately, into embryos, producing an animal engineered to survive in cold environments rather than a genetic carbon copy of the extinct species.

To ground that work, the company has assembled a large library of ancient genetic material, compiling more than 50 mammoth genomes spanning over a million years of evolution, a scale of data described by Colossal. That genomic depth is meant to help researchers distinguish the traits that truly defined mammoths from incidental variation, though translating a catalog of genes into a healthy living animal remains the central and unproven leap.

The woolly mouse milestone

The company’s most tangible proof of concept to date is not a mammoth at all but a mouse. Researchers engineered mice carrying multiple mammoth-associated gene variants, producing rodents with long, wavy, woolly hair and altered fat metabolism, a result reported by Time. The so-called woolly mouse demonstrated that several cold-adaptation traits could be edited into a living animal at once and expressed as intended.

Supporters see the mouse as validation that the underlying editing approach works, while critics point out the enormous gap between a modified mouse and a modified elephant. Mice reproduce quickly and are among the most studied laboratory animals, whereas elephants have long gestation periods, complex social needs, and are themselves endangered, all of which complicate any attempt to scale the technique up to a mammoth-sized project.

The money and the debate over what counts as de-extinction

The venture is capitalized on a scale that sets it apart from typical academic research. The company secured a $200 million investment that brought its total funding to $435 million and lifted its valuation to $10.2 billion, figures reported by The Jerusalem Post. That war chest funds not only the mammoth work but parallel projects aimed at other lost or vanishing species.

The deeper controversy is definitional. What Colossal proposes to create is a cold-adapted elephant engineered to resemble a mammoth, not a resurrected member of the extinct species, and scientists disagree over whether that qualifies as bringing an animal back. The company argues the resulting animals could help restore Arctic grassland ecosystems, while skeptics question the ecological logic and the welfare implications of engineering large, long-lived mammals for a world very different from the one their ancestors knew.

For now, the 2028 date remains a stated goal rather than an accomplished fact, and the honest measure of the project is the distance between its ambition and its results so far. The company has shown it can edit mammoth traits into a mouse and has amassed the funding and genomic data to attempt far more. Whether that translates into a calf that carries the mammoth’s legacy, and whether such an animal should be called a mammoth at all, are questions the next few years are set to answer.

This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed before publication.

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