Scientists Are on the Cusp of Resurrecting the Extinct Woolly Mammoth

In case you forgot, the woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago.

They are very, very extinct.

Perhaps not for long, though?

The Guardian reports scientists are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form. All thanks to genetic engineering.

To be clear, it wouldn’t be exactly the same. Scientists refer to the creature as a “mammophant”, which—if you couldn’t already guess—is part elephant, part mammoth.

Speaking at an annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the “de-extinction” effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating the hybrid embryo.

While the team is moving toward creating embryos, it’ll still be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature is made. It would have features like small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood.

On top of the sheer coolness of resurrecting an extinct animal, the project will also help preserve the Asian elephant (which is already endangered). Double whammy?

Meanwhile, others have raised concerns about how ethical it is to make an animal “de-extinct”.

“The mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant,” Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, told the Guardian.

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

In other news, completely unrelated to mammophants, genetic engineering will make age-reversal a reality within the next 10 years.

Yeah, sick.

Photo: Giphy and iStock