NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • September 13, 2021
Harvard geneticist George Church has co-founded a new company with an audacious goal: engineer an elephant that resembles the extinct woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to use woolly mammoth DNA to make a hybridized Asian elephant that could thrive in Arctic climates. Using these hybrids, Colossal’s long-term goal is to convert swaths of today’s mossy tundra into the grassy steppes they once were during the Pleistocene epoch, the period of multiple ice ages that ended 11,700 years ago. The park’s vision of bringing back ancient grasslands is “an exciting hypothesis,” says University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill, based on the effects that today’s elephants have on their habitats. However, she cautions that researchers still don’t know the full details of how woolly mammoths’ ecosystems functioned, which complicates efforts to remake them today.