That blue pelt was irresistible to the European colonists who poured into the bluebuck’s native South Africa, and it took them only about 150 years—from 1650 to 1800—to hunt the animal to extinction. Today the bluebuck exists only in drawings from the naturalists who saw it while it lived, and in stray specimens in science museums. Now, however, the bluebuck may be on its way back, thanks to Colossal Biosciences, the company that last spring made headlines with the news that it had de-extincted the dire wolf, which last walked the Earth more than 10,000 years ago and now prowls again in the form three young snow-white canids produced by editing the genome of a common gray wolf to express the traits of its dire wolf cousin. The company is also working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the moa. Today it announced that the bluebuck would join that lost menagerie.
The need is urgent. Of the 90 antelope species in the world, 55 are experiencing declining populations and 29 of those are threatened with extinction. Colossal’s goal is not only to bring the bluebuck back, but to use the genetic techniques it masters in those efforts to fortify existing endangered populations.
Once the differences between the roan and bluebuck are determined, the researchers will edit the DNA in a roan cell accordingly. Then they will extract the rewritten nucleus from the cell, and implant it into a roan ovum that has been stripped of its own nucleus. That modified ovum will be allowed to develop into an embryo in a lab, and will then be implanted into a roan surrogate. After a 278-day gestation period, the roan mother will give birth to a bluebuck calf.
“We filtered them and got to about three million variants,” says Scott Barish, a Colossal genome engineer. “Then we got it down to 2.4 million truly functional regions of the genome, and then narrowed our focus to what are truly key phenotypes and got down to about 20,000. It’s so much more manageable but still an imposing number.”
“That matters enormously for species where every individual counts,” said Shapiro in a statement. “We’re building this platform for bluebuck but the conservation adaptations for living antelope species…are just as significant as the de-extinction work itself.”
“Bringing the bluebuck back is only half the work,” says Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm. “The other half is making sure the world is ready to protect it when it returns. That means working across governments, conservation organizations, and international regulatory bodies to establish formal protections that follow the bluebuck wherever it lives, not just in a single reserve, but across the southern African landscape it once called home.”
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