Real-life Jurassic Park aims to bring woolly mammoths back to life

There’s a new approach to tackle climate change is to bring back Wolly Mammoths, the idea is that the Mammoths like elephants – are particularly adept at bashing down forests, which might not sound conducive to helping climate change, but it could create large grasslands in the tundra of Siberia, which could help to preserve the permafrost, beneath which huge amounts of harmful gases and carbon are stored.

The project is the brainchild of Colossal – a company that wants to bring thousands of woolly mammoths back into the world in the future.

The creatures went extinct around 4,000 years ago, but Colossal believes they could play a vital role in preserving the future of our planet.

Without getting too far into the actual science – because, unsurprisingly, it’s rather complicated – this isn’t exactly cloning; rather, they want to take mammoth genetics and put them into existing Asian elephants, the mammoth’s closest modern-day relative.

The company is founded by geneticist George Church and technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm said, “There is no silver bullet when it comes to climate change. It’s going to take a while to get to Arctic re-wilding, we’re going to have our first few calves in four to six years, and it’s going to take six to seven years before they can be truly self-sustainable and knocking down trees, so it’s going to take a while. We need to be looking at solar and alternative energy sources, we need to be moving to electric, there are a million other things that humanity needs to do. I don’t think that Colossal is the be-all and end-all, but it is a natural plan and what’s nice about it is that we think we can sequester a lot of carbon and keep the permafrost cooler and we think that we can suppress a lot of methane from being released.”

Source: Agencies Jurassic Park Wolly Mammoths Jurassic Park Wolly Mammoths