Scientist explained whether we can actually resurrect extinct animals

Dallas biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has attracted worldwide attention with its revolutionary project to bring back long-extinct animals. Recently, scientists announced the birth of offspring possessing key characteristics of ancient wolves that last roamed North America more than 10 millennia ago.

Modern science offers several approaches to the so-called "resurrection" of extinct species: selective breeding, cloning, and synthetic biology using genome editing technologies.

It's important to understand that the result of these methods is not an exact genetic copy of the extinct animal, but its modern analogue. Essentially, an organism is created that physically or behaviorally resembles its ancient predecessor.

A demonstrative example is the project to "revive" the woolly mammoth. Colossal specialists are working on creating a cold-adapted Asian elephant capable of performing the ecological function of a mammoth. However, between these species there are about 1.5 million genetic differences that emerged over hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary divergence. Complete editing of such a number of genetic variants is technically impossible, so scientists have focused on just a few dozen genes responsible for cold resistance, fat accumulation, and hair growth.

For comparison: humans and chimpanzees have a genetic similarity of about 98.8%, but demonstrate enormous behavioral and physical differences.

In the dire wolf project, Colossal made only 20 genetic modifications to the genome of the modern gray wolf to reproduce key characteristics of the extinct species. The resulting animals are genetically much closer to modern wolves than to their ancient ancestors.

Perhaps the scientific community should introduce more precise terminology for such achievements: "synthetic proxies," "ecological analogues," or "engineered restorations." These terms better reflect the scientific reality, as full resurrection of extinct animals remains an unattainable goal for now.