Scientists Create Woolly Mice. Next up is the Mammoth That Went Extinct Around 4,000 Years Ago Animals belonging to past periods always invite fascination, like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. A company went one step ahead in its fascination when it decided to resurrect some of these beings,

Colossal Biosciences genetically engineered a ‘woolly mouse’ with mammoth traits. The milestone could inform human gene therapy.

Scientists working to bring back the woolly mammoth have created genetically engineered mice that they say have several features of the extinct ice age giant.

The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago, during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

The journey to the woolly mouse began with the woolly mammoth. Scientists at Colossal examined more than 100 genomes of Asian elephants and woolly mammoths. They lined up those genomes side by side and compared them to find the parts which are crucial for making a mammoth.

US biotechnology company Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences has a radical proposal: it wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth from extinction. In a preprint paper published on March 4, scientists at Colossal report making a significant step towards this objective.

Using DNA and genomics technologies, scientists have modified the mice to have longer, thicker hair and an altered metabolism expected to allow them to tolerate colder temperatures, Colossal Biosciences said.

While the Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences project to bring back extinct species has been compared to “Jurassic Park”, it has started at a much smaller scale than a T. Rex: woolly mammoth mice.