The woolly mammoth, one of the largest land mammals to walk on Earth, was wiped out from the face of the planet around 10,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of the large, furry, distant relatives of modern-day elephants are some well-preserved fossils that have been recovered from frozen Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and the United States.

Over the past few years, Colossal Biosciences, an American biotech company, has been working towards something that has never been achieved by humans – bringing an extinct species back.

CREDIT: Colossal Biosciences

On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced it had achieved a major breakthrough in the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. Colossal announced that it has successfully created the world's first Woolly Mouse – mice engineered to express multiple key mammoth-like traits that provide adaptations to life in cold climates.

According to Colossal, its team of scientists engineered the Colossal Woolly Mouse by successfully modifying seven genes simultaneously to create mice with dramatically altered coat colour, texture, and thickness reminiscent of the woolly mammoth’s core phenotypes.

CREDIT: Colossal Biosciences

"The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission," said Ben Lamm, Co-Founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. "By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we've proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create. This success brings us a step closer to our goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth."

Colossal, which was co-founded by technology and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm and world-renowned geneticist and serial biotech entrepreneur George Church, is on a mission to bring back some of the most famous extinct species known to us. This includes the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, northern white rhinoceros, and dodo bird.

CREDIT: Colossal Biosciences

In 2024, Colossal announced that it had achieved a global-first iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) breakthrough. For this, they genetically edited Asian elephants — the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth.

"The Colossal Woolly Mouse showcases our ability to use the latest genome editing tools and approaches to drive predictable phenotypes," said Dr. Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal. "It is an important step towards validating our approach to resurrecting traits that have been lost to extinction and that our goal is to restore."

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