No more. In a recent conversation with TIME, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm concedes that those goal posts have moved more than a little. “We are thinking it will be in the early 2030s,” he says. “We don’t have a hard date. Not 2036, but not 2030 either.”
Colossal proved its de-extinction chops in the spring of 2025, when it announced that it had brought the extinct dire wolf back to life, editing the genome of the closely related gray wolf to replicate the features of its vanished cousin—including a white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.
Why woolly mammoths are so hard to de-extinct
To do something similar with the woolly mammoth, Colossal discovered that the work would be a heavier genetic lift than their research teams had originally expected. The initial estimate was that it would take edits to about 60 genes to turn an elephant nucleus into a mammoth nucleus that could then be used to create a mammoth embryo. Now that number is about 150—and rising.
The genetics of the mammoth’s characteristic heavy coat have also been unpacked. Nearly all hairy mammals—humans included—have oil-secreting glands known as sebaceous glands in the skin. The oil keeps individual hairs supple and prevents them from drying and breaking. Elephants, which have a very sparse covering of bristly hair across their bodies, were thought to be an exception to this rule. That made the job of engineering a mammoth from an elephant more difficult, since mammoths surely had sebaceous glands to sustain their extravagant coat. But Colossal researchers conducted dissection and close examination of samples of elephant skin and found that that earlier received wisdom was wrong—the skin does contain small, rudimentary sebaceous-like structures. The trick now is to isolate the genes that code for the glands and edit them to create the fully developed version the mammoth will need.
In March 2025, Colossal revealed that it had created a small brood of 38 woolly mice, engineered with mammoth coding for shaggy hair written into their genome. The mice have thrived and bred, passing on their long, coarse hair to their pups. That was a good start, but mice aren’t mammoths, and to study how effective the genetic editing is, researchers will need to work with a larger mammal. Colossal promises that a woolly pig is coming, though the company does not say when it will be revealed.
“It’s a little weird and Frankensteiny,” says Lamm, “but we’ve done that.”
Potential implications for humans
That was a longstanding mystery until recently. Both human and elephant cells are now known to carry a tumor-suppressor gene labeled TP53. When DNA in a cell is damaged—by cancer or other means—the gene codes for the release of the p53 protein, which either halts the damaged cell’s growth cycle to allow for repair, or, if the DNA is too corrupted, kills the cell. Humans carry two copies of the TP53 gene, while elephants carry 20—making for much greater cancer resistance. Additionally, elephants but not humans carry what is known as an LIF6 gene, which also produces a p53 protein, one that specifically targets the mitochondria—an energy-producing organelle located in the cellular cytoplasm—of damaged calls, killing them before they can divide and spread.
“Colossal is not conducting research on humans, but its work with mammoth, elephant, and other genomic datasets could yield insights relevant to human cancer research,” says a company spokesperson. “Understanding mechanisms such as elephants’ TP53-related cancer resistance is exactly the kind of problems Astromech is trying to understand, leveraging the mammoth, elephants and other datasets.”
For now, the goal of turning all of this scientific benchwork into a walking, breathing, breeding mammoth goes on—even if at a slower pace than originally predicted. “I hate to say this, because I don’t want to call the mammoth a product,” says Lamm, “but it will be a better product because of our deeper analysis of what truly made a mammoth a mammoth.”
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