A Texas-Based Company Wants to Bring Back this Extinct Animal for One Specific Reason
We saw what happens when you do this sort of thing many times over thanks to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and "Jurassic Park." Apparently this Texas-based company and their Harvard cohorts aren't up to date on popular block buster movies.
"For the first part, we actually have sequenced genomes from various mammoths' DNA that's been collected over the years," Lamm tells CBS. "That process is to really understand the genome and how it relates to its closest phylogenetic relative being the Asian elephant. The Asian elephant is actually 99.6% genetically identical to the woolly mammoth."
A Texas company, Colossal, and a Harvard scientist are teaming up to un-extinct mammoths by 2027. Which isn't quite as scary as un-extincting velociraptors, but let's be honest here, we have no idea what'd actually happen if they are successful. Oh well, let's do this.
"I just fell in love with the idea of the project," said Colossal CEO Ben Lamm, who alongside Harvard scientist George Church aim to bring wooly mammoths back to life.
"I reached out to George Church at Harvard University a little over three and a half years ago," Lamm said. "His passion and his tone changed completely when he started talking about de-extinction and the mammoth."
Their theory is that the woolly mammoth would help climate change. "You could actually lower the temperature of the permafrost anywhere from half a degree to anywhere up to 10 degrees," said Lamm.
They even have a plot of land picked out for the mammoths over yonder, in Siberia. Check out more on this interesting story here.