Colossal Biosciences is a privately held biotechnology company founded in 2021 by the entrepreneur Ben Lamm and the geneticist George Church to pursue De-extinction: producing animals resembling extinct species by editing the genomes of their closest living relatives. Its stated flagship targets are the woolly mammoth, the thylacine and the dodo. It is the best-funded organization ever to work on the problem and also the most criticized, chiefly over whether an edited proxy animal can properly be described as a de-extincted species.
Overview
Colossal does not clone extinct animals. No viable cell has ever been recovered from a species that was already extinct, and the only extinct animal ever cloned, the bucardo, came from tissue banked while its last individual was still alive, as De-extinction describes. The company's method is comparative. It sequences ancient DNA to identify the genetic differences between the extinct species and a living relative, selects a subset of those differences judged to underlie the phenotype of interest, and introduces them into the relative's cells using CRISPR–Cas9 and related tools including Base editing. An animal is then produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer (the technique behind Dolly and her successors) or by germline transmission. For the mammoth the living relative is the Asian elephant; for the thylacine, the fat-tailed dunnart; for the dodo, the Nicobar pigeon. Church had set out the general programme years before the company existed, alongside proposals for recoded genomes and other large-scale genome engineering.1
The company also presents itself as a conservation technology business. It argues that the tools built for de-extinction, namely genome assembly from degraded samples, multiplex editing, cloning and artificial gestation, apply directly to endangered species. Most of the debate about Colossal turns on that claim.
History
Lamm, a serial software entrepreneur, and Church, whose Harvard laboratory had been editing elephant cells with mammoth variants since the mid-2010s, incorporated the company in 2021. It raised successive rounds at rapidly rising valuations, reported at over $10 billion in early 2025, from venture investors and from individuals interested in conservation and in the publicity the projects attract.
Beth Shapiro, an ancient-DNA researcher and author of a well-known skeptical book on de-extinction, joined as chief science officer in 2024. The hire gave the company scientific credibility and drew criticism from colleagues who read her earlier work as inconsistent with the company's marketing.2
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2021FoundedBen Lamm and George Church launch the company with the woolly mammoth as its flagship target and a stated goal of calves before the end of the decade.
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2022Thylacine programmeA second programme targets the thylacine, using the fat-tailed dunnart as the host species, with a laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
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2023Dodo programmeA bird programme is announced, requiring primordial germ cell techniques that do not yet work in pigeons.
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2025The woolly mouseMice edited with several mammoth-associated coat and metabolism variants are announced as a demonstration of multiplex editing in a live animal.
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2025The dire wolf claimThree grey wolf pups carrying, on the company's account, about twenty edits at fourteen genes are presented as de-extincted dire wolves, drawing immediate and widespread scientific objection.
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2025Further targetsThe company announces work on the giant moa in partnership with New Zealand interests, extending the bird programme.
Programmes
Mammoth
The mammoth project aims to produce an Asian elephant carrying a set of edits associated with cold adaptation: hair, subcutaneous fat, haemoglobin oxygen affinity at low temperature, and temperature-sensing channels. Church's laboratory reported editing elephant cells with mammoth variants before the company existed. The company has stated a target of first calves in the late 2020s.
The project faces three severe obstacles. Asian elephants are endangered, and using them as surrogates for a 22-month pregnancy raises welfare and regulatory problems. Colossal proposes to solve these with an ex utero gestation system that does not exist for any large mammal, and the Ectogenesis literature suggests that the step from supporting a late-gestation lamb to gestating an elephant from implantation is not incremental. Elephant cloning has never been demonstrated. And a genuinely mammoth-like animal would need far more edits than have so far been attempted, with each additional edit carrying the off-target and structural-rearrangement risks that accumulate in multiplex editing.
Thylacine
The thylacine, extinct since 1936, has a comparatively recent and well-sequenced genome, and its living relatives are small marsupials with short gestation. In some respects marsupial reproduction is more tractable than placental reproduction, because young are born at an early developmental stage and complete development in the pouch. The genetic distance between the thylacine and the dunnart is nonetheless very large, considerably larger than between mammoth and elephant.
Birds
The dodo and moa programmes face a different obstacle. Birds cannot be cloned by nuclear transfer, so edits must be made in primordial germ cells and transmitted through a chimeric host. The technique works in chickens and has not been established in pigeons or ratites.
The dire wolf announcement
In 2025 Colossal announced three pups, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, produced from grey wolf cells carrying, on the company's account, roughly twenty edits across fourteen genes, and described them as dire wolves. Scientific objection was immediate and near-uniform. Dire wolves belong to a lineage that diverged from grey wolves several million years ago and differ at a very large number of loci, so an animal with twenty engineered changes is a grey wolf with a modified phenotype. Critics also noted that some edits were chosen to produce a white coat, a trait for which the fossil record offers no evidence and which appears to reflect popular culture rather than palaeontology.
The company defends the label with a functional species concept: if an animal fills the ecological role and displays the relevant traits, the name is defensible. Few systematists accept that position, and the episode is now the standard illustration of what critics mean when they call de-extinction a marketing category.
What "de-extinction" deliversNo extinct species has been restored. What exists are living animals of extant species carrying a small number of edits derived from an extinct relative's genome. These animals lack the extinct species' full genome, its gut microbiome, its learned behaviour and its ecological context. Whether they are useful is a separate question from whether the name is accurate.
Funding and spin-outs
Colossal is venture funded, with reported valuations rising sharply across successive rounds. It has spun out two companies: Form Bio, a computational biology platform, and Breaking, which works on enzymatic degradation of plastics. The company cites the spin-outs as evidence that the de-extinction work generates transferable technology; critics cite them as evidence that the de-extinction work is a fundraising vehicle for other businesses.
The company reports a conservation portfolio that includes cloning red wolves from cell lines derived from a hybrid coyote population, work on cane-toad-toxin resistance in the northern quoll, and genetic rescue projects in several other species. This work is closer to established conservation genetics than the flagship programmes are, and it has drawn less objection.
Criticism
Four distinct objections recur.
Taxonomic. An edited proxy is not the extinct species. Species are defined by ancestry and by whole genomes rather than by a handful of traits, so calling the result a mammoth or a dire wolf misstates what has been achieved. The IUCN's own guidance on the subject uses the term "proxy" throughout and states explicitly that the products of such work are not the extinct species restored.3
Conservation opportunity cost. Ecologists have argued that resources spent on de-extinction would save more biodiversity if spent on habitat protection, and that a claimed technological fix weakens the political case for prevention. The Precautionary principle literature identifies the same moral-hazard structure in other domains. The counter-argument is that Colossal's funding comes from investors who would not otherwise fund conservation at all.
Animal welfare. Elephant surrogacy, repeated cloning attempts with high embryonic loss rates, and the creation of animals with no conspecifics or natural habitat all raise welfare questions, which the company has addressed in general terms.
Communication. The company announces results through press releases and documentary partnerships ahead of peer review. Independent evaluation is slow as a result, and the announcements shape public understanding in ways the scientific record later has to correct. This criticism has done the most damage to Colossal's standing among researchers, including some who are sympathetic to the underlying science.
Outlook
Colossal's technical contributions are real and can be judged separately from its claims. Multiplex editing at scale in mammalian cells, ancient genome assembly from heavily degraded material, and cloning in difficult species are genuine capabilities. The same toolkit underlies Xenotransplantation pig engineering, parts of Gene drives research, and the governance debates about who may release an engineered organism into a shared environment. The concrete test the company has set itself is whether an elephant calf carrying mammoth edits is born in the late 2020s, and gestation remains the binding constraint.
The company has also forced a definitional question that will outlast it. If a species is a lineage, no amount of editing restores one, and the whole enterprise is misnamed. If a species is a set of functions in an ecosystem, editing living relatives is a legitimate route to restoring something valuable, and the objection is semantic. Conservation biology has not settled which definition it means, and Colossal has made the question an expensive one.
See also
- De-extinction
- George Church
- CRISPR–Cas9
- Xenotransplantation
- Gene drives
- Synthetic genomes
- Artificial womb
- Human cloning
References
Footnotes
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bookChurch, G. and Regis, E. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Basic Books, 2012. ↩
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bookShapiro, B. How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction. Princeton University Press, 2015.↩Written nine years before its author became the company's chief science officer, and argues that edited proxies are not restored species.
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reportIUCN Species Survival Commission. IUCN SSC Guiding Principles on Creating Proxy Species for Conservation Benefit. International Union for Conservation of Nature, 2016.↩Guidance from a conservation body with no regulatory authority; it uses "proxy" throughout and sets a conservation-benefit test rather than a taxonomic one.