Woolly Mammoth

Is the woolly mammoth really on the brink of being resurrected?

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A company called Colossal claims it has taken a “momentous step” towards bringing back the woolly mammoth. Here’s all you need to know about whether such a feat is possible

Unlike extinct woolly mammoths, most edited elephants with mammoth-like traits would have no tusks, to get around ivory poaching

A company set up to resurrect extinct animals says it has achieved a major breakthrough in its goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth. On 6 March, Colossal announced that its team had managed to turn normal elephant cells into stem cells, which could lead to a mammoth-like creature. “This is a momentous step,” its CEO, Ben Lamm, said in a press release. Here’s what you need to know.

Is it really possible to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction?

No it isn’t and never will be. While the genomes of several frozen mammoths have been sequenced, these are riddled with gaps. However, it should be possible to edit the genomes of living elephants to make them mammoth-like. Colossal acknowledges on its website that what it plans to create will be “a cold-resistant elephant”, but says the animal will have “all the core biological traits of the Woolly Mammoth”.

Will these edited elephants look like mammoths?

According to Colossal, they will even sound like them, though how it knows what mammoths sounded like is unclear. When it comes to their appearance, there will be at least one major difference: the vast majority will have no tusks to avoid ivory poaching, says George Church, Colossal co-founder. Those with tusks could be kept only in places with heavy surveillance, he says.

Colossal also plans to make the mammoth-like elephants resistant to a highly fatal disease caused by elephant endotheliotropic herpesviruses.

Why does Colossal need to make elephant stem cells?

The company has been editing the genomes of elephant cells to make them more mammoth-like. But to create a living mammoth-like elephant, it needs to generate embryos containing an edited genome. In theory, one way to do this is to turn gene-edited elephant cells into so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, and then to turn those into eggs and sperm cells.

What are induced pluripotent stem cells?

Pluripotent stem cells can turn into any cell in the body, including eggs and sperm. They occur naturally in embryos, but can also be made from adult cells by adding certain proteins, hence the “induced”. They have been made in many animal species, but, before now, no one had managed to induce elephant cells to become pluripotent.

Why is it hard to induce elephant cells to become pluripotent?

At least in part, it is probably because these large, long-lived animals need to have better anticancer mechanisms and that means tighter control on the growth of stem cells.

How did Colossal manage it?

Among other things, it genetically modified Asian elephant cells to permanently produce the key proteins. Even then, it still took two months to transform the cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. “We do want to make the process more efficient and faster, but I think it’s a great start,” says Eriona Hysolli at Colossal. The DNA that codes for the key proteins can be easily removed, she says.

So now Colossal will turn these induced pluripotent stem cells into eggs and sperm?

That’s the plan, but it could take many years. Turning induced pluripotent stem cells into eggs and sperm is far from easy. “It’s been done mainly in two species, which is mouse and human,” says Church. “And neither one of them is perfect.”

Does this mean it could be decades before mammoth-like elephants can be created?

Colossal claims its first “mammoth” will be born by 2028. Hysolli says the researchers aim to make just 50 to 100 genetic edits to elephant cells, which is feasible. But to generate embryos in time to meet the deadline, they will almost certainly have to transfer the edited genomes into elephant eggs using the cloning technique used to create Dolly the sheep. Because elephants have a two-year gestation period, these embryos would have to be created and implanted by around the end of 2026.

Will cloning the edited cells work?

It might, but, typically, just a few per cent of cloned embryos develop into healthy animals. “There are bound to be failed attempts. How many elephant cows will have to be subjected to the experimental pregnancies?” asks stem cell expert Dusko Ilic at King’s College London. “Just because we have the capability to do something new, that does not mean that we should pursue it without careful consideration of the ethical implications and consequences.”

Where will these mammoth-like elephants live? Given the war in Ukraine and Russia’s claims about US bioweapons, isn’t there close to zero chance of Russia allowing genetically reincarnated mammoths to be released in Siberia?

“Keep in mind that mammoths were everywhere in the Arctic circle and not just in Siberia,” says Hysolli. Alaska and Canada are also possibilities, she says, and Colossal is already having “very fruitful collaborations” with government agencies, local governments and Indigenous peoples.

Why is Colossal aiming to bring back the mammoth?

The company claims that rewilding the Arctic area with mammoths can help limit climate change by reducing permafrost melt and locking away carbon in the form of frozen organic material. “The Arctic is the perfect place to be sequestering carbon because every year it freezes another layer of topsoil,” says Church. “And then the herbivores poop on top of that.” 

Could mammoth-like creatures really help limit further warming in the Arctic?

That remains to be established, but there is some plausibility. One small study suggests large herbivores can lower permafrost temperatures by flattening insulating snow in winter. And if the edited elephants limited forest expansion, that would also help, as dark trees in previously flat, snowy areas can have a warming effect by absorbing more sunshine. But many thousands would be needed to have a significant impact.

Are you saying Colossal aims to have tens of thousands of these creatures roaming the Arctic?

Yes, that is the aim. Based on the growth of elephant populations in favourable conditions, New Scientist estimates it could take a century or more to breed this many mammoth-like elephants from a small starting population.

But Church says Colossal is developing artificial uteruses that will bypass the usual limits. “So we could, in principle, do this at whatever scale the world wants and needs. If they don’t need it, then we won’t scale it up,” he says.

Can De-Extinction Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth?

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Could mammoths walk on Earth in the next decade?

The idea of de-extinction has been around for some time now and many have pondered upon it. Now, a startup plans to make this idea a reality by bringing back the woolly mammoth from the dead, thousands of years after it went extinct. The startup is partially funded by Harvard University’s renowned geneticist, George Church, and the company is called Colossal.

The woolly mammoth roamed the Arctic for thousands of years before eventually going extinct. Early humans began hunting these mammoths for food and used their bones as tools. Scientific studies show that changing climate conditions forced these freely moving animals into smaller habitats, where human hunting finished them off almost 4000 years ago. Models also show that if it weren’t for the hunting, the mammoths could have survived until recently.

Either out of guilt or to take the next big leap in science, researchers have been pondering about resurrecting the mammoth. This Jurassic Park-like experiment has also been aided by the finding of well-preserved mammoth remains that hold bits of mammoths’ DNA in them. Combining these with recent technological developments in the field, the resurrection or “de-extinction”, as it is called, is quite possible, the company says. 

The company has condensed the entire process into a 13-step high-level plan on its website. The first step begins with the sourcing and then sequencing of the genome of the Asian elephant, a mammal that is reported to share 99.6 percent of its DNA with the woolly mammoth. The team will then sequence the genome of the woolly mammoth that the researchers in George Church’s Harvard Lab secured in 2018. 

Since most characteristics are encoded by the sequences in our genomes, the researchers will be able to identify regions in the Asian elephant’s genome that differ from the woolly mammoth’s. Using CRISPR, the team will then edit the genome of the Asian elephant and verify if the edited cells demonstrate abilities to survive in cold environments. Once this is confirmed, they will insert the editing nucleus in an egg cell and then fertilize it artificially. Once complete, the cell will develop into an embryo that will then be implanted in an African elephant for the gestation of up to 22 months, bringing the woolly mammoth back on Earth.

In an interview with Venture Beat, Colossal said that all the fundamental science needed to achieve this is now solved, and the company could see their first woolly mammoth calves in the next four to six years. Co-founder Ben Lamm, a serial entrepreneur in the tech industry, said that the formation of the company will accelerate the research work.

But the de-extinction effort is not just for goosebumps. Colossal believes that returning the woolly mammoth to the Arctic grasslands will help in arresting the effects of climate change. In their time, the mammoths traversed vast regions in the Artic and conserved its environmental health. Restoring the mammoth to its habitat will help in methane suppression and carbon sequestration, thereby helping climate change. 

Lifetime Travels of Woolly Mammoth That Lived More Than 14,000 Years Ago Chronicled by Researchers

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A groundbreaking study on a woolly mammoth named Élmayuujey’eh revealed her extensive travels over 14,000 years ago across northwestern Canada and Alaska, offering insights into mammoth behaviors, social structures, and interactions with early humans. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Research on a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth unveils her migration patterns, interactions with early humans, and contributions to understanding mammoth life and extinction.

An international team of researchers from McMaster University, University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Ottawa has tracked and documented the movements and genetic connections of a female woolly mammoth that roamed the earth more than 14,000 years ago.

She traveled hundreds of kilometers through northwestern Canada and Alaska over the course of her lifetime, which ended when she encountered some of the earliest people to have traveled across the Bering Land Bridge.

The last remaining woolly mammoths lived alongside the region’s first peoples for at least 1,000 years, but little is known about how the mammoths moved across a landscape increasingly populated by people and whether those movements made them more vulnerable to hunting.

Sina Beleka, a post-doctoral researcher at the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and co-author of the study examines a sample. Credit: Sidney Roth/McMaster University

Archaeological Findings and Genetic Analysis

The mammoth at the center of this study, named Élmayuujey’eh by the Healy Lake Village Council, was discovered at Swan Point, the earliest archaeological site in Alaska, which also contained remains of a juvenile and a baby mammoth. Mammoth remains have also been found at three other archaeological sites within 10 km of Swan Point.

Researchers conducted a detailed isotopic analysis of a complete tusk and genetic analyses of the remains of many other individual mammoths to piece together their subject’s movements and relationships to other mammoths at the same site and in the vicinity. They determined that the Swan Point area was likely a meeting ground for at least two closely related, but distinct matriarchal herds.

The findings are published on January 17 in the journal Science Advances.

“This is a fascinating story that shows the complexity of life and behavior of mammoths, for which we have very little insight,” says evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre who led the team that sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of eight woolly mammoths found at Swan Point and other nearby sites to determine if and how they were related.

A sample used in the study that tracked the travels of a woolly mammoth that wandered the earth 14,000 years ago. Credit: Sidney Roth/McMaster University

Mammoth Life and Human Impact

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks performed isotopic analyses of the tusk. Mammoth tusks grew like tree trunks, with thin layers marking steady growth, and isotopes from different elements—oxygen and strontium, for example—provided information about the subject’s movement.

The female mammoth was approximately 20 years old when she died, having spent much of her life in a relatively small area of the Yukon. Researchers report that as she grew older, she traveled over 1000 km in just three years, settling in interior Alaska and dying near a closely related baby and juvenile, for which she may have been the matriarchal lead.

Mammoths are presumed to behave much like modern elephants, with females and juveniles living in close-knit matriarchal herds and mature males traveling alone or in looser male groups, often with larger home ranges than the females.

Researchers say using multiple forms of analysis, as in this study, allows them to make inferences about the behavior of extinct mammoths.

The McMaster team extracted and analyzed ancient DNA from the tusk of Élmayuujey’eh, which revealed the mammoth was closely related to the other mammoths from the same site and more distantly related to others from a nearby site called Holzman.

Early human populations, with a deep understanding of mammoths and the technology to hunt them, took advantage of mammoth habitats, using scavenged and hunted remains as raw materials for tools, the researchers report.

In addition to the direct impact of hunting on mammoth populations, human activity and settlements may have also indirectly affected mammoth populations by curtailing their movements and their access to preferred grazing areas.

“For early people in Alaska, those localities were important for observation and appreciation, and also a source of potential food,” says Poinar.

The collected data suggests that people structured their seasonal hunting camps based on where mammoths gathered and may have played an indirect role in their local extinction in Alaska, which was compounded by a rapidly changing climate and changing vegetation.

Such deprivations did not appear to have affected the subject mammoth, though.

“She was a young adult in the prime of life. Her isotopes showed she was not malnourished and that she died in the same season as the seasonal hunting camp at Swan Point where her tusk was found,” said senior author Matthew Wooller, who is director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility and a professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

“This is more than looking at stone tools or remains and trying to speculate. This analysis of lifetime movements can really help with our understanding of how people and mammoths lived in these areas,” says Tyler Murchie, a recent postdoctoral researcher at McMaster who conducted the ancient DNA analysis with Sina Baleka. “We can continue to significantly expand our genetic understanding of the past, and to address more nuanced questions of how mammoths moved, how they were related to one another and how that all connects to ancient people.”

Harvard Scientists Say They Could Be Just 2 Years Away From Resurrecting Woolly Mammoth Genes

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Scientists are working on an ambitious plan to resurrect the woolly mammoth from extinction using genetic engineering – more than 4,000 years after the species died out on Earth.

And according to the researcher leading the ‘de-extinction’ project, the team could be just years away from seeing the first mammoth-elephant hybrid embryos being developed.

The Harvard mammoth project started in 2015, with the researchers identifying several genes in the woolly mammoth genome that code for distinctive mammoth traits. The mammoth DNA was extracted from remains that had been frozen under the Siberian permafrost for millennia.

The team has already successfully spliced 45 of these mammoth genes into elephant cells to show that the technique works.

“We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood,” Church told Sarah Knapton from The Telegraph.

But they’re now moving towards creating the first hybrid embryo.

The plan is to take Asian elephant skin cells and then use gene editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to insert woolly mammoth genes into the genome.

The team will also take a fertile egg cell from a female elephant, and remove its nucleus – the part of the cell that contains all the genetic material.

The researchers will then splice the genetically modified skin cell with the no-nucleus egg cell, so that the egg takes on the modified DNA.

Those eggs will be artificially stimulated to develop into embryos.

“We’re working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab,” Church explained.

Once the team develops an early-stage embryo, the plan is to grow them in artificial wombs rather than transplanting them back into female Asian elephants to bring them to term.

“We hope to do the entire procedure ex-vivo (outside a living body),” Church told Devlin. “It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species.”

But seeing as no mammals have been grown to term outside of the womb to date, it’s questionable whether the artificial womb technology will be ready as early as the hybrid embryos.

Still, Church is confident that they can pull it off, and says his team has already managed to use artificial wombs to grow mice embryos to halfway through gestation.

“We’re testing the growth of mice ex-vivo. There are experiments in the literature from the 1980s but there hasn’t been much interest for a while,” he said. “Today we’ve got a whole new set of technology and we’re taking a fresh look at it.”

Church will be presenting his work at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston this week.

His team’s ’embryogenesis’ technique hasn’t been tested or peer-reviewed as yet, so for now, we have to take his claims about the first hybrid embryo being just two years away with a big grain of salt.

But even if they can pull it off, there are ethical concerns about bringing back genes that have been extinct for thousands of years to consider.

“The proposed ‘de-extinction’ of mammoths raises a massive ethical issue – the mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant,” Matthew Cobb, a zoologist from the University of Manchester who isn’t involved in the project, told The Guardian.

“What will happen when the elephant-mammoth hybrid is born? How will it be greeted by elephants?”

Others are more excited by the prospect – Edze Westra, a CRISPR expert from the University of Exeter in the UK, told The Telegraph. “What George Church is doing in trying to revive particular species I think represents a massive opportunity.”

“One can also use this technology for engineering the DNA of rapidly declining species or those that are becoming too inbred to increase their chance of survival,” he added.

But it’s not just about bringing a species back from the dead. Church told the media that their project has two goals – securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant, and helping to combat global warming.

That last point might sound weird, but mammoth-elephant hybrids could actually play an important role in preventing tundra permafrost from meltingand releasing huge amounts of greenhouse has into our atmosphere.

“They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” said Church. “In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.”

Woolly Mammoth DNA Successfully Spliced Into Elephant Cells

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But don’t expect mammoth clones anytime soon.

WOOLLY MAMMOTH MUSEUM DISPLAY

A group of researchers are getting closer to bringing the extinct woolly mammoth back to life. Geneticist George Church’s lab at Harvard University successfully copied genes from frozen woolly mammoths and pasted them into the genome of an Asian elephant.

 Using a DNA editing tool called CRISPR, the scientists spliced genes for the mammoths’ small ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair length and color into the DNA of elephant skin cells. The tissue cultures represent the first time woolly mammoth genes have been functional since the species went extinct around 4,000 years ago.

The research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal “because there is more work to do,” Church told the U.K.’s Sunday Times, “but we plan to do so.”

The work is part of an effort to bring extinct species back from the dead, a process called “de-extinction”. The recent breakthrough shows that one proposed de-extinction method–which involves splicing genes from extinct animals into the genomes of their living relatives–just might work. But don’t believe the headlines suggesting woolly mammoth cloning is just around the corner. Church explained to Popular Science that there’s a lot more research to be done.

“Just making a DNA change isn’t that meaningful,” says Church. “We want to read out the phenotypes.” To do that, the team needs to figure out how to take the flat hybrid cells from a petri dish and coax them into becoming specialized tissues–such as blood cells or liver organoids–then test to see if they behave properly. For example, do the mammoth hair genes lead to hair that’s the right color, length, and woolliness?

If those tests go well, the team hopes to turn the elephant/mammoth skin cells into hybrid embryos that can be grown in artificial wombs, devices that allow for pregnancies outside of an animal’s uterus. Artificial wombs are pretty speculative at this point, but the alternative–implanting the hybrids into the wombs of female elephants–is unsavory to animal rights activists as well as geneticists. “It’s going to be more humane and easier if we can set up hundreds of [embryos] in an incubator and run tests,” says Church.

If they can get the hybrid creatures to survive, the project’s first goal will be to engineer an elephant that can survive in cold temperatures. The team thinks that expanding the elephant’s range into colder climates could help keep it away from humans and the conflicts that are threatening to make Asian and African elephants extinct. Later, after the engineered elephants gain a foothold, Church says the team will try to revive the mammoths by integrating higher amounts of mammoth DNA into the hybrids.

Of course, it’s possible the mammoth genome will never be completely reconstructed, and the creatures will only remain elephant/mammoth hybrids. But if it looks like a mammoth and fulfills the same ecological functions as a mammoth, is it a mammoth? What even is a mammoth, anyway?

Not quite Jurassic Park, but could Woolly Mammoth roam again?

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De-extinction scientists want to bring back vanished species by using new genomic technologies

If you thought the woolly mammoth and the dodo were gone for good, then think again – scientists in America are working to bring vanished species back to life.

Aided by new genomic technologies, biologists at The Long New Foundation in California are investigating the possibility of resurrecting creatures such as the sabre-toothed tiger.

The Revive and Restore project aims to achieve the “genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species”.

On their website, The Long New Foundation says: “The DNA of many extinct creatures is well preserved in museum specimens and some fossils. Their full genomes can now be read and analysed.

“That data may be transferable as working genes into their closest living relatives, effectively bringing the extinct species back to life.

“The ultimate aim is to restore them to their former home in the wild.”

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Steven Brand, the project’s president and co-founder, spoke about a plans to create a population of woolly mammoths in a Siberian preserve called Pleistocene Park, which was created by Russian scientist Sergey Zimov.

“We’ve framed it in terms of conservation,” Brand said. “We’re bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic. One or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success.”

But it’s not quite Jurassic Park just yet.

Currently, the project is working to resurrect the passenger pigeon, which became extinct in 1914.

Ben Novak, the foundation’s research and science consultant, told the publication that the construction of the passenger pigeon genome is underway and that the scientists hope to have reintroduced the birds into the wild by 2060, if all goes according to plan.

And there’s certainly excitement in the scientific world surrounding the possibilities.

In a paper published in Science, the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford University, argued that de-extinction ought to be pursued on the basis that it would “surely be very cool”.

However, many conservation biologists are concerned about the implications of the movement, questioning the logic of bringing back species whose environments have been destroyed, as well as the potential for creating a breeding ground for new diseases.

“We have answers for every question,” Novak told the New York Times Magazine.

“We’ve been thinking about this a long time.”

Then again, we all know what happened in Jurassic Park…

What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?

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Professor finds some evidence to support a comet collision as the trigger for the Younger Dryas, which may have contributed to megafauna extinction
Nanodiamonds

Nanodiamond textures observed with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy: A) star twin; B) multiple linear twins.

Bull Creek, OK excavation

The excavation at Bull Creek, Okla., shows the paleosol — ancient buried soil; the dark black layer in the side of the cliff — that formed during the Younger Dryas.
Could a comet have been responsible for the extinction of North America’s megafauna — woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths and saber-tooth tigers? UC Santa Barbara’s James Kennett, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science, posited that such an extraterrestrial event occurred 12,900 years ago.

Originally published in 2007, Kennett’s controversial Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) hypothesis suggests that a comet collision precipitated the Younger Dryas period of global cooling, which, in turn, contributed to the extinction of many animals and altered human adaptations. The nanodiamond is one type of material that could result from an extraterrestrial collision, and the presence of nanodiamonds along Bull Creek in the Oklahoma Panhandle lends credence to the YDB hypothesis.

More recently, another group of earth scientists, including UCSB’s Alexander Simms and alumna Hanna Alexander, re-examined the distribution of nanodiamonds in Bull Creek’s sedimentological record to see if they could reproduce the original study’s evidence supporting the YDB hypothesis. Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“We were able to replicate some of their results and we did find nanodiamonds right at the Younger Dryas Boundary,” said Simms, an associate professor in UCSB’s Department of Earth Science. “However, we also found a second spike of nanodiamonds more recently in the sedimentary record, sometime within the past 3,000 years.”

The researchers analyzed 49 sediment samples representing different time periods and environmental and climactic settings, and identified high levels of nanodiamonds immediately below and just above YDB deposits and in late-Holocene near-surface deposits. The late Holocene began at the end of the Pleistocene 11,700 years ago and continues to the present. The researchers found that the presence of nanodiamonds is not caused by environmental setting, soil formation, cultural activities, other climate changes or the amount of time in which the landscape is stable. The discovery of high concentrations of nanodiamonds from two distinct time periods suggests that whatever process produced the elevated concentrations of nanodiamonds at the onset of the Younger Dryas sediments may have also been active in recent millennia in Bull Creek.

“Nanodiamonds are found in high abundances at the YDB, giving some support to that theory,” Simms said. “However, we did find it at one other site, which may or may not be caused by a smaller but similar event nearby.”

A “recent” meteorite impact did occur near Bull Creek but scientists don’t know exactly when. The fact that the study’s second nanodiamond spike occurred sometime during the past 3,000 years suggests that the distribution of nanodiamonds is not unique to the Younger Dryas.