Historical interbreeding between modern-day elephants and woolly mammoths was not necessarily impossible, but it is highly improbable it ever happened for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n
The first significant factor is the two species (and in elephant terms, we\u2019re talking Asian elephants, because African elephants<\/a> were of course restricted to Africa) almost certainly never met, even though they overlapped in time, with\u00a0mammoths only going extinct some 4,000 years ago<\/a>. <\/p>\n While both mammoths and Asian elephants<\/a> lived on Asia, that is an enormous landmass, and mammoths were creatures of the cold northern tundras, while elephants today are creatures of warmer, woodland habitats.<\/p>\n OK, what\u2019s the second reason?<\/p>\n They are not that closely related. This paper in\u00a0Nature<\/a>\u00a0found that the lineage of what we know today as African elephants diverged from mammoths and what became Asian elephants a whopping 7.6 million years ago, while mammoths and Asian elephants then themselves split about 6.7 million years ago. To put this in context, this division in the proboscidean order occurred roughly at the same as the\u00a0human-chimpanzee split<\/a>, and we can\u2019t breed with modern chimps.<\/p>\n So, case closed, there was no nookie going on?<\/p>\n Well, there are some caveats. Animals that are not especially closely related can and do interbreed.\u00a0Hybrids<\/a>\u00a0of unions between bottlenose dolphins (genus\u00a0Tursiops) and false killer whales (genus\u00a0Pseudorca) have been recorded in captivity, and it helps that these species have the same number of chromosomes<\/a> \u2013 44. Hybridisation has also been recorded off the Outer Hebrides between wild populations of\u00a0bottlenose dolphins and Risso\u2019s dolphins<\/a>\u00a0(genus\u00a0Grampus).\u00a0<\/p>\n Do mammoths and elephants have the same number of chromosomes?<\/p>\n In fact they do \u2013\u00a056 in each<\/a>. This\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0published in 2024 reconstructed a three-dimensional mammoth genome from a skin sample, and showed how similar it is to the Asian elephant\u2019s. The model showed how certain genes were switched on and off within the skin cells and, the story explains, how \u201ccertain genes involved with cold adaptation and hair growth were turned on in a mammoth, but not in an elephant.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of the reasons why the biotech company\u00a0Colossal<\/a>\u00a0is attempting to \u2018resurrect\u2019 the woolly mammoth by editing the Asian elephant genome to insert traits that would give its offspring a mammoth-like appearance \u2013\u00a0a long shaggy coat, curved tusks and fat deposits, for example. Technically, these animals would be cold-resistant elephants rather than mammoths brought back to life. As Colossal founder George Church has previously told\u00a0National Geographic<\/a>, \u201cWe\u2019re de-extincting genes not species.\u201d<\/p>\n Is there a point to this research, other than the excitement of having elephants that look like woolly mammoths?<\/p>\n Actually, there is \u2013\u00a0scientists<\/a>\u00a0suggest that restoring large herbivores such as woolly mammoths<\/a> (or, more accurately, animals that behave like woolly mammoths) would help areas of the Arctic return to a more steppe, grass-dominated ecosystem that would reflect more sunlight and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. But it\u2019s a long way from bioengineering a mammoth (which is still not yet possible) to producing free-ranging herds of them that have any meaningful impacts at a landscape scale.<\/p>\n Do we know if woolly mammoths could hybridise with any other species?<\/p>\n