A company called Colossal Biosciences is actively working to produce a living, mammoth-like calf by late 2028. It won’t be a true woolly mammoth. It will be a cold-adapted Asian elephant carrying key mammoth traits, created through gene editing. Whether that counts as “bringing back” the woolly mammoth depends on what you mean by the phrase, and the scientific, ethical, and practical hurdles still standing in the way are enormous.
What’s Actually Being Built
The project isn’t cloning a mammoth from ancient DNA. Woolly mammoth DNA is too degraded after thousands of years in permafrost to reconstruct a complete genome from scratch. Instead, the team led by geneticist George Church is using CRISPR gene editing to take living Asian elephant cells and swap in specific mammoth gene sequences at targeted locations. The Asian elephant is the mammoth’s closest living relative, and the two species share roughly 99.6% of their DNA.
So far, the team has replaced 14 locations in the elephant genome with mammoth versions. The initial targets are practical: genes that control blood hemoglobin (so the blood can carry oxygen efficiently in freezing temperatures), ear size (mammoths had small ears to reduce heat loss), subcutaneous fat (for insulation), and hair growth. The goal is an animal that looks and functions like a mammoth in cold environments, even though the vast majority of its genome remains Asian elephant.
Scientists describe this kind of organism as a “proxy species” rather than a genuine resurrection. Because the animal would be epigenetically and behaviorally different from its ancestors, having never learned from a mammoth herd or developed in a mammoth womb, it’s more accurate to call it a mammoth-elephant hybrid engineered for cold tolerance. Some researchers argue this distinction matters less than it sounds, pointing out that every conservation-bred population, from California condors to black-footed ferrets, is technically a proxy of the “authentic” wild version that preceded it.
The 2028 Target and Its Obstacles
Colossal’s CEO, Ben Lamm, has publicly stated the company is on track for a late 2028 birth, accounting for the 22-month elephant gestation period. That means a viable embryo would need to be implanted by roughly early 2027. The company has raised over $200 million in venture capital to fund this work, alongside parallel de-extinction projects for the dodo and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).
The technical challenges are stacking up, though. Editing 14 gene locations is a proof of concept. A convincingly mammoth-like animal would likely require changes at hundreds or thousands of sites, and each edit needs to function correctly alongside every other edit in a living organism. Gene editing in elephant cells has been demonstrated in the lab, but producing a healthy embryo from those edited cells is a different problem entirely.
Then there’s the question of how to gestate it. Using a living Asian elephant as a surrogate raises serious ethical concerns, since Asian elephants are themselves endangered, pregnancies are risky, and the species has never been successfully bred through in vitro fertilization. Colossal has mentioned developing artificial womb technology as an alternative, but no artificial womb has ever sustained a mammal anywhere near the size of an elephant calf, which weighs around 250 pounds at birth. The company has not publicly detailed how far this technology has progressed.
Many outside scientists view the 2028 date as optimistic. The gap between editing genes in a cell culture and producing a living, breathing animal that survives infancy is vast, and each step involves biology that hasn’t been done before at this scale.
Why Bother Bringing One Back
The ecological argument centers on Arctic permafrost. Permafrost across Siberia and northern Canada contains an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of carbon. As the Arctic warms, that carbon escapes into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. The theory, tested on a small scale at a project called Pleistocene Park in Siberia, is that large grazing animals can help maintain grassland ecosystems that keep permafrost colder than forests do. Herds of heavy animals knock down trees, compact snow in winter (which actually makes the ground colder, since fluffy snow acts as insulation), and promote grass growth that reflects more sunlight than dark forest canopy.
Existing animals like bison, horses, and musk oxen are already being introduced at Pleistocene Park for this purpose. Mammoth-like creatures could theoretically fill the same niche more effectively, given that mammoths were the dominant landscape engineers of the Arctic for millions of years. Critics note that you’d need enormous herds across millions of square miles to make a meaningful climate impact, and that breeding a single hybrid calf is a very long way from that.
Regulatory and Ethical Barriers
Even if a mammoth-like calf is born, releasing it into the wild faces a tangle of regulations. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has issued guidelines noting that any organism created through genome engineering qualifies as a genetically modified organism under international law, specifically the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. That triggers specific national and international regulations that could limit the ability to transport the animal across borders or release it into natural environments.
The IUCN has also previously called for a moratorium on environmental releases of GMOs until they can be demonstrated safe for biodiversity “beyond reasonable doubt.” Any proposed release of a proxy mammoth would need to follow the same reintroduction guidelines applied to any conservation translocation, including a detailed exit strategy for reversing the release if something goes wrong. Each proxy species would need to be evaluated separately against every relevant piece of legislation, and it’s currently unclear how existing treaties like CITES would classify an animal that belongs to no recognized species.
Beyond the legal framework, there are straightforward welfare questions. A single mammoth-like calf born in a lab would have no herd, no mother to learn from, and no existing social structure. Elephants are deeply social animals with complex learned behaviors passed between generations. Raising a cold-adapted hybrid without any of that social context raises concerns about the animal’s quality of life that regulations haven’t yet been designed to address.
What “Coming Back” Really Means
The honest answer is that the woolly mammoth, as a species that roamed the Arctic for hundreds of thousands of years, is not coming back. Its full genome, its microbiome, its learned behaviors, and its ecological relationships are gone. What may come back is something new: a genetically modified Asian elephant with mammoth-like features, designed to tolerate cold climates. Whether that happens by 2028, by 2040, or at all depends on solving a cascade of biological problems that no one has solved before.
The technology being developed along the way, including advances in CRISPR editing, artificial reproductive technology, and genomic preservation, may end up being more consequential than the mammoth itself. Those tools could eventually help endangered species that are still alive, by increasing genetic diversity in small populations or enabling reproduction in animals that struggle to breed in captivity. For now, the mammoth project is equal parts conservation science, genetic engineering experiment, and very expensive bet on the future.