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Scientists are one step closer to bringing Woolly Mammoths back to life
Scientists have revealed a breakthrough that means they’re one step closer to bringing the extinct woolly mammoth back into existence.
Playing a game of Word Association, if your opponent were to say “extinct”, what would you reply? Woolly mammoth would be a popular answer, and that’s because it was one of the last in a line of mammoth species that went extinct 4,000 years ago. Movies like 10,000 BC and Ice Age have depicted them, and there’s even a horror movie called Mammoth about an alien bringing one of the creatures to life. In short, they haven’t been forgotten and remain on the mind after all this time, but what if we were able to bring the animals back?
Scientists closer to bringing back woolly mammoth
There is a de-extinction company named Colossal Biosciences and this month they shared a statement with Live Science explaining that they’ve made a stem cell breakthrough in elephants that could mean bringing back the woolly Mammoth species.
The company’s Woolly Mammoth team relays that it’s been successful in deriving induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from Asian elephants. This update means researchers can now further explore the adaptations that differentiate woolly mammoths from their closest living relatives and essentially test gene edits without having to take tissue from living animals, in this case, the woolly mammoth.
Eriona Hysolli, head of biological sciences and mammoth lead at the company, told the publication that “These cells definitely are a great benefit to our de-extinction work” because they can reveal the processes behind the features (i.e. thick hair, unique tusks) that helped them survive the Arctic climate.
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Perhaps more excitingly, on the other hand, it’s the iPSCs that will facilitate the creation of elephant sperm and egg cells that would be instrumental in bringing about mammoth de-extinction.
If the investigative research team successfully creates a woolly mammoth embryo via the fusion of ancient mammoth DNA and elephant cells, the embryo would then need to be implanted in an elephant surrogate for a 22-month gestation period.
“There is more validation to be done,” Eriona clarified, “so until you do the experiment you can never be sure, but we think that the pluripotency potential [to differentiate into any cell type] is fully there.” It’s all very complex, but you can’t deny it’s incredibly exciting.
You won’t be walking around and spying a majestic woolly mammoth in your local park anytime soon, but still, the potential for de-extinction is closer than ever before.
Why did woolly mammoths go extinct?
Wooly mammoths went extinct due to melting icebergs.
This was discovered by a team of researchers at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge in England, who published their findings in a journal called Nature.
After analyzing woolly mammoth DNA and environmental remains in soil samples collected from the Arctic over the past decade, the researchers were able to determine that it was the icebergs melting, therefore affecting vegetation (the food source for the creatures), that caused the species to die out.
“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt, it led to the formation of lakes, rivers, and marshes,” Yucheng Wang, zoologist at the University of Cambridge who wrote the paper on the discovery, acknowledged in a statement. “We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation humans had no impact on them at all based on our models.”
