The 2026 De-Extinction Race: Why We’re Spending Billions to Bring Back the Mammoth

For most of history, extinction was a closed door. Once a species disappeared, that was it. What’s changed in the last decade isn’t just technology, it’s the idea that extinction might be partially reversible, or at least workable around.

The woolly mammoth has become the main test case for that idea. Not because it’s the most important extinct animal, but because it’s one of the few where the science, the available DNA, and the environment all line up just enough to make the attempt plausible. And at this point, it’s not theoretical. There are active projects, serious funding, and timelines being discussed in the de-extinction race.

What Scientists Are Actually Building

No one is cloning a mammoth. The DNA we have from frozen remains is fragmented and degraded, which makes direct cloning impossible with current technology. Instead, the approach is to modify the genome of the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. Researchers have already identified key genetic differences between mammoths and elephants, particularly genes related to:

• Hair growth (long, dense fur)
• Fat storage and insulation
• Hemoglobin adapted to cold temperatures
• Smaller ears to reduce heat loss

Using tools from genetic engineering, especially CRISPR, scientists edit elephant cells to introduce these mammoth traits. The goal is to produce an embryo that carries a combination of elephant and mammoth characteristics. So the end result wouldn’t be a perfect mammoth. It would be a cold-adapted elephant engineered to function like one.

The Hard Part: From Cells to an Animal

Editing cells is one thing. Turning that into a living animal is where most of the difficulty is. There are two main approaches being explored:

• Elephant surrogates – Implanting an edited embryo into a female Asian elephant.
• Artificial wombs – Developing external gestation systems to avoid using live animals.

Both come with problems. Elephants have long pregnancies (around 22 months), low reproductive rates, and complex social structures. Using them as surrogates raises ethical concerns, especially given that Asian elephants are already endangered.

Artificial womb technology exists in early forms (mainly for much smaller mammals), but scaling it to something the size of an elephant is still experimental. So while gene editing has made progress, gestation is still a major bottleneck.

Why the Mammoth Project Exists at All

The justification isn’t just “because we can.” One of the main arguments comes from climate science. The idea is that large, cold-adapted herbivores could help restore Arctic grassland ecosystems, sometimes referred to as the “mammoth steppe.”

Here’s how that’s supposed to work:

• Grazing animals knock down trees and maintain open grassland
• Grasslands reflect more sunlight than forests, reducing heat absorption
• Trampling compacts snow, which allows deeper freezing of the ground
• Colder ground slows the thawing of permafrost

Permafrost contains large amounts of trapped carbon. As it thaws, it releases CO₂ and methane, accelerating climate change. The theory is that restoring a grazing ecosystem could slow that process.

There are already small-scale experiments testing this idea, like rewilding projects in Siberia. But scaling it up, and proving that mammoth-like animals would make a meaningful difference, is still uncertain.

Who’s Funding This

This isn’t being driven by governments alone. A large part of the funding is coming from private biotech. The most prominent company involved is Colossal Biosciences, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars specifically for de-extinction projects. Their stated goal includes producing the first mammoth-like calves within the next few years.

That funding is what’s pushing the timeline forward. Without it, this would likely remain a slower academic effort. But it also changes expectations. Once you’re operating at that scale, there’s pressure to show results, not just publish research.

What’s Been Achieved So Far

Of course, you might be wondering how far we’ve come. Well, while progress is real, it’s still very limited. Researchers have:

• Sequenced large portions of the mammoth genome
• Identified key adaptive traits
• Successfully edited elephant cells in the lab

What hasn’t happened yet:

• No full mammoth-like embryo has been brought to term
• No viable hybrid animal exists yet
• Artificial wombs at this scale are not operational

So the gap between “we can edit genes” and “we have a living animal” is still significant.

The Main Criticisms

There are three main areas of pushback. First is resource allocation. Conservationists argue that funding should go toward protecting endangered species that still exist, rather than trying to recreate extinct ones.

Second is ecological uncertainty. Even if mammoth-like animals are introduced into Arctic environments, ecosystems today aren’t identical to what they were thousands of years ago. The outcome isn’t fully predictable.

Third is ethics. This includes using endangered animals as surrogates, creating animals for experimental purposes, and managing long-term welfare in artificial or semi-wild environments. These aren’t side issues—they directly affect whether the project is considered acceptable. And for now, a lot of people don’t really think that it is.

What Happens If It Works

If a mammoth-like animal is successfully created, that’s only the beginning. You would still need a stable population (not just a few individuals), a suitable habitat for them, and, of course, some sort of long-term management strategies.

And even then, it wouldn’t be a true restoration of the past. It would be a controlled introduction of a newly engineered species into a modern ecosystem. So success isn’t just “we made one.” It’s whether the species can exist in a meaningful, sustainable way.

But the mammoth project isn’t just about one species. It’s more like a test case for a broader shift. If this works, the same approach could theoretically be applied to other extinct animals, or used to modify existing ones to survive changing environments.

That’s where it starts to move beyond curiosity and into something more consequential. Because at that point, we’re not just preserving ecosystems—we’re actively redesigning parts of them. And whether that’s a solution or a new set of problems depends entirely on how controlled—and how limited—that process ends up being.