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The man who’s bringing back the Woolly Mammoth, as well as some other long-extinct species, sees the world differently than us
Ben Lamm is the most famous name in science right now, and he’s not even a scientist. But he is the inspiration for and co-founder with George Church, who is a scientist, of Collosal Biosciences, the company that wants to bring back extinct species and restore their beneficial contributions to the eco-system. Ben, the entrepreneurial and charismatic face of the company, gained worldwide attention a few years ago by announcing their intention of reviving the Woolly Mammoth.
But this is no Jurassic Park fantasy. Lamm is targeting the creation of about 48,000 “Woolly Mammoths” — actually DNA manipulated Asian elephants, the closest living animal to resemble the mammoth — who are expected to adopt the same physical features and behaviors of the long extinct mammoth. In this way, the new version can adapt to the places and climates the woolly mammoth once thrived in and help, among other things, preserve the perma frost, which is critical.
Colossal has already “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf and is working on several other dead or dying-off species, including the Dodo — who doesn’t want the Dodo back?
When I asked him how close they were to reviving the Woolly Mammoth, he said: “We are currently on track for our first calves in late 2028, subject to our elephant surrogacy board final approval and access.” Just around the corner folks.
I asked him about whether these new animals would have the instincts of their forebearers, or would they behave and react and have different priorities in a very different and modern world? “We are not trying to resurrect a carbon copy of a species that existed thousands or millions of years ago. We are rebuilding extinct species for today. What we are engineering are animals for is carrying the key biological traits of their extinct counterparts, optimized to thrive in and restore the ecosystems of today.
“On the question of instinct specifically, many behaviors are hardwired at the genetic level, so core instincts are expected to emerge naturally from the genetic architecture we are restoring. The question is not whether these animals will be behaviorally identical to their ancient ancestors — they will not be, and we do not claim otherwise. The question is whether they will fulfill the ecological roles their ancestors once held. That is the standard we are engineering toward.”
You travel with a different perspective than most, and to a different set of places than most people go — what and where has struck you as the most astonishing?
New Zealand, which we toured with director Peter Jackson, was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I was astonished at how it actually looked like a place from a pro-topian film.
What’s interesting about New Zealand is how the community has been focused on protecting the species it has with fervor. They’re one of the only countries to have established a nationwide predator-free initiative, Predator Free 2050, aimed at completely eradicating introduced or invasive predatory mammals such as rats, stoats, and possums, which have long threatened the survival of its unique native wildlife. If they can do it, there is hope for other places where their species are under-attack, and the more species saved, the better off we all are.
Where haven’t you been yet in your work that you want to go?
I’m really interested in travelling to Timbuktu — but the current situation there makes it extremely unstable to visit. It has such a rich and storied history as one of the great centers of learning and civilization in the ancient world, and the region surrounding it (in Mali) holds ecological and archaeological layers that I believe could yield extraordinary insights into species that once thrived there.
There are so many animals and plants that have long since vanished from the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa that aren’t recorded elsewhere. The prospect of understanding what that ecosystem looked like before centuries of desertification, conflict, and human pressure fundamentally altered it, is something that I want to explore. When stability returns, I hope we have the chance to learn there.
Where have you not enjoyed going? Has anywhere frightened you?
I’m obsessed with reading and learning about space, but space travel itself scares me. I was once invited to fly on a NASA mission to space as part of a study about how the heart and body adapt to extreme environments. I so badly wanted to participate, but I have this overwhelming fear of space travel so unfortunately, I had to pass.
What’s your favorite hotel in the world?
This is tough – there are so many, but if I have to choose one I’d say Blanket Bay, outside Queenstown, New Zealand. The scenery of the shores of Lake Whakatipu with the snow capped Southern Alps is a view like no other.
Where have you had the best food?
I had the most amazing French onion soup in Japan, of all places.
Where should people see while we still can?
The Amazon.
It might sound trite because this is what everyone says but we are losing the Amazon at a rate of roughly one to two football fields of forest every single minute. And what people don’t fully grasp is that we’re not just losing trees but we’re losing entire biological libraries. Species that haven’t even been catalogued yet, plants with medicinal properties we haven’t discovered, insects and fungi that form the invisible scaffolding of ecosystems we depend on.
Once that’s gone, if it has not been categorized, it is very unlikely to come back in a meaningful human timescale. So everyone should still go while they can, because the window for that real experience is closing faster than most people realize, unless we very quickly change course.
Other than hunting to extinction, why have we lost species like the woolly mammoth and the Dire Wolf or Dodo?
Rarely does just one thing cause extinction. Instead, it is almost always a confluence of pressures arriving at the wrong moment for a species that had no evolutionary playbook for what it was facing.
With the woolly mammoth, human hunting played a role, but climate change at the end of the last Ice Age was equally devastating. As the planet warmed, the steppe grasslands, which were the mammoth’s primary habitat and food source, shrank dramatically and were replaced by forests and tundra that couldn’t sustain the mammoths nutritionally. They were squeezed from both sides: habitat collapsing beneath them while human hunters pursued them from above.
The Dire Wolf is different; it was a victim of its own specialization. It was supremely adapted to hunt the megafauna of the Pleistocene — i.e. giant ground sloths, ancient horses, camels — but when those species collapsed, the Dire Wolf had nowhere to pivot. Its cousin the grey wolf, being more generalist and flexible, survived.
The Dodo is perhaps the most heartbreaking because it was a perfect storm of insularity. Having evolved on Mauritius with no natural predators, it had lost its fear response entirely. When humans arrived bringing rats, pigs, and dogs, the Dodo had no behavioral or biological defenses whatsoever. It wasn’t stupidity that killed it like people think, but rather it had never learned to be afraid.
Why does it matter that we lost them?
Every species that goes extinct takes with it a functional role in its ecosystem that nothing else can fully replace. Those roles are often far more consequential than we appreciate until they’re gone.
For example, the woolly mammoth was an ecosystem engineer on a massive scale. Their migration patterns compressed snow, which actually kept the permafrost frozen. Their grazing maintained the grasslands that reflected sunlight and regulated temperature. Without them, the entire character of the Arctic landscape shifted. We’re now beginning to understand that their disappearance may have actively accelerated permafrost thaw, which obviously has enormous implications for climate change today.
Concurrently, animals like wolves’ absence reshaped predator dynamics across an entire continent. When apex predators vanish, prey-populations explode and overgraze, vegetation collapses, rivers change course. And, we’ve seen this play out in reverse in modern times with the wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone where bringing one predator back literally altered the physical geography of the park within years.
Every species lost changes the ecosystem. Some have a bigger impact than others. But, also every species returned brings us on a path to a stronger ecosystem too.
Can your work really make the world a better place?
The world is already in a biodiversity crisis of staggering proportions.
We are losing species at a rate that most people find too overwhelming to even think about. And the traditional conservation toolkit was simply not built for the scale of what we’re facing. We needed new tools. We needed to be willing to ask questions that felt uncomfortable or even impossible.
What we’re doing with de-extinction isn’t just about bringing back charismatic animals for the spectacle of it. Every species we’re working on represents a functional role in an ecosystem that has been missing. The mammoth work alone, if successful, could have a measurable impact on permafrost preservation at a time when permafrost thaw is one of the most dangerous climate feedback loops on the planet.
And the genomic tools we’re developing don’t stay locked inside our lab. The technologies we’re building to resurrect lost species are the same technologies that can prevent living ones from going extinct.
I believe doing nothing and accepting extinction as permanent and irreversible without even trying is not a defensible position. So yes. I believe we can make the world better, and we have to.
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