Woolly mice are a first step in restoring the mammoth

Extinction is typically for good; when it comes to the woolly mammoth, however, that rule has now been bent.

- JEFFREY KLUGER

It’s been 4,000 years since the elephant-like beast walked the earth, but part of its DNA now operates inside several litters of mice created by scientists at the Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences. The mice don’t have their characteristic short, gray-brown coat, but rather the long, wavy, woolly hair of the mammoth. They also have the beast’s accelerated fat metabolism, which helped it survive earth’s last ice age. Both traits are the result of gene editing that Colossal’s scientists hope will hasten the reappearance of the mammoth itself as early as 2028.

Colossal has been working on restoring the mammoth ever since the company’s founding in 2021. The animal’s relatively recent extinction and the fact that it roamed the far north means that its DNA has been preserved in multiple remains embedded in permafrost. For its de-extinction project, Colossal collected the genomes of nearly 60 of those recovered mammoths.