Woolly Mammoths could be 'de-extinct' in 2 years

This whole nostalgia thing is getting out of control because scientists are about to bring back the woolly mammoth, the Guardian reports.

Harvard professor George Church—who New Scientist calls a "maverick geneticist"—is leading a "de-extinction" team that says it's about two years away from creating a hybrid embryo combining mammoth traits with Asian elephant DNA.

Woolly mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago due to human hunting and warming temperatures. But in the past few years, Church and his team have managed to splice 45 mammoth edits into Asian elephant DNA, including ones that control for a mammoth's shaggy hair, small ears, fat layers, and more.

While Church and his team believe they can have a "mammophant" embryo in two years, it will be much longer before anyone sees one in the wild. The team wants to grow mammophants completely in a lab in order to not mess with the reproduction of endangered Asian elephants, and that technology doesn't exist -read more