The first clone of a woolly mammoth will appear by 2027

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Biotechnology company Colossal hopes to revive the population of woolly mammoths, which died out about 10,000 years ago.Currently, gene editing of one of the mammoths, well preserved in the permafrost of Siberia, is underway. The optimism of the researchers is added by the fact that the DNA of these animals is more than 99 percent identical to the DNA of living Asian elephants.

If the gene editing is successful, scientists will be able to form a woolly mammoth embryo, which will then be placed in the egg of a female African elephant. The birth of the first baby mammoth is scheduled for 2027.

The ultimate goal of the – the revival of the population of these extinct animals with their subsequent resettlement in one of the Arctic regions, probably to the place of their former residence. Biotechnologists believe that this should have a positive impact on the planet's climate. The fact is that the extinction of mammoths led to cascading changes in the entire ecosystem, which at that time was the largest in the world. The mammoth steppe, which stretched from France to Canada and from the Arctic islands to China, contained millions of these large herbivores. They were key contributors to an ecosystem so vast that it affected the climate.

The death of large cold-hardy mammoths over the past 10,000 years has robbed the ecosystem of grasslands that once efficiently sequestered carbon. Now there are forests and swamps overgrown with moss, which do not help in the fight against global warming as effectively. one of the world's largest reservoirs of carbon threatening to be released into the atmosphere.

If successful, Colossal scientists are determined to go further. Next in line for "reincarnation" may become a thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian marsupial wolf, exterminated by man in the 30s of the last century.

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