Extinct Animals Could Suddenly Be Brought Back to Life

Woolly mammoths haven't been seen for 4,000 years, but if scientists are successful, they could be walking around Alaska in just five years.

Colossal Biosciences researchers in Texas who study ancient DNA found a 99.6 percent match between the woolly mammoth and the Asian elephant. It makes the species an ideal candidate for surrogacy and researchers plan to transfer a woolly mammoth embryo to an Asian elephant in 2026. If all goes according to plan, after a 22-month gestation period, the first woolly mammoth in millennia will be born in 2028.

Once the woolly mammoth calves are born, they'll be transported to their habitat in the Arctic circle, starting with Alaska and Canada.

Anyone who's seen the Jurassic Park films might believe that extinct species are better off left buried. But Colossal Biosciences CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said that his company's work is drastically different than that of InGen in the movies mentioned above.

"Jurassic Park is a dystopian movie around not thinking about the unintended consequences of bringing back these species," Lamm told Newsweek.

Lamm and his team build out calculated plans for each extinct species they hope to bring back, including how they'll survive in their natural habitat and when to release them into the wild.

But there are plenty of animals that Colossal Biosciences won't bother reinstating because they could cause other species to become extinct.

"Part of the reasons as to why the dodo went extinct was not because they were stupid or because people liked to eat them, but it was the introduction of invasive species in their egg-laying ground," Lamm said.

One species Lamm has no plans on bringing back from extinction is the Christmas Island Rat, given its invasive tendencies.

Experts believe that the modern extinction rate is as much as 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate, also known as the rate of extinction that would occur if humans didn't exist, according to World Wildlife Fund (WWF), making for a dim outlook on the future of life. It's impossible to determine the exact number of extinctions occurring each year, given that researchers don't know how many species exist on the planet, as there are countless undiscovered species living in rainforests or beneath the ocean's depths. However, WWF estimates that from 200 to 2,000 extinctions occur every year if there are 2 million different species on the planet.

Return to life

Colossal Sciences has poured years of research and millions of dollars into the projects, and Lamm said the woolly mammoth work is "well on its way." However, scientists must study more than DNA to ensure the species' success. The company has partnered with several elephant conservation organizations for the project. It also studies animal husbandry and ensuring that the modern woolly mammoth wouldn't be susceptible to viruses that have killed its ancestors and relatives.

"We are trying to rebuild extinct species for today," Lamm said, adding that a research team is working to develop a vaccine to protect mammoth and elephant calves from the deadly Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus, the leading cause of death among Asian elephants. "We really think about how to engineer a more resilient, healthier animal."

The first generation of mammoths would live in expansive habitats managed and monitored by animal care teams.

"From there, we will implement a stage-gated process by which the descendant generations will be moved to larger and less managed facilities in what we call soft-release sites," Lamm said. "Eventually, as those generations mature and demonstrate independence, they will be moved to 'wild' release sites."

Also on Colossal Biosciences' list of projects is the dodo, a flightless bird on the island of Mauritius that went extinct in the 1600s, and the Tasmanian tiger, which vanished in the 1930s.

The future of artificial wombs

Colossal Biosciences conducts extensive research on which species could help the environment if they're brought back. Lamm said that the successful re-wilding of certain species, such as large herbivores and key carnivores, could be fundamentally important to ecosystem stability.

The Steller's sea cow could help the marine ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest, but efforts to bring the species back have been stymied by the lack of an adequate surrogate in today's world.

Colossal Biosciences has employed a 17-person team to work on artificial womb development to foster embryos of extinct species like the Steller's, a massive animal that reached up to 30 feet long and weighed up to 22,000 pounds.

"[Steller's sea cows] were marine mammals so important to our world, but there's nothing that we can currently gestate them in," Lamm said. "They were really important to the kelp forests, important to carbon sequestration, but it's just too big."

The Steller's was discovered in the mid-1700s, but hunted to extinction less than 30 years later.

"I think we will be successful whether it takes five years or 10 years," Lamm said.

While it'd be astonishing to bring woolly mammoths or other extinct species back to life, Colossal Biosciences also focuses its research on saving the animals that are alive today.

"Conservation is really important on the path to de-extincting these species," Lamm said. "We are developing better assisted reproductive technology that could help critically endangered species now."