It’s also bringing to fruition a dream that 40 years ago might have seemed fanciful, but in 2026 is seeing opinions rapidly evolve, even within the scientific community.
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Dr. Beth Shapiro would know. The evolutionary molecular biologist and geneticist has been studying Ancient DNA since her graduate school days at Oxford in the early 2000s. By then, the first academic paper on Ancient DNA was well-known, with Allan Wilson’s UC Berkeley extinct study group publishing its findings in 1984. The document is often cited as an influence on Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and also prompted the first question a journalist ever asked a scientist in this field: Can you one day bring back a woolly mammoth?
“My first book was actually called How to Clone a Mammoth [published in 2015],” Shapiro tells us, “which was a long-form answer to why it was really hard, and all of the technological, ethical, and social challenges one would need to solve to get to the point where you can bring a mammoth back to life. So the idea of de-extinction has been circulating in Ancient DNA, but I think what’s changed is the technology has advanced to the point where all of the foundational tools that we need to make it happen exist. Now they just need to be accelerated and be pushed to the extreme.”
Consider that one of the breakthroughs has been advancing and scaling up multiplex-genome engineering. With their dire wolf, Colossal pinpointed about 20 edits needed in the gray wolf genome to functionally recreate the dire wolf in appearance, behavior, and ecological function. Some of the other species Colossal aims to de-extinct next will demand thousands, tens of thousands, and possibly a million edits. All of it is on the table.
Such rapid advancement has led to a fair amount of skepticism, both among the press and perhaps more acutely in the world of academia where scientists like Shapiro hail. (She is technically on a three-year sabbatical from the University of California, Santa Cruz while now working as the chief science officer at Colossal.) But a colleague of hers who’s also been fascinated by the potential of de-extinction for just as long—Dr. Andrew Pask, Colossal’s chief biology officer and head of the company’s research efforts in Australia—says such perceptions are changing given recent breakthroughs in combatting the fatal EEHV in elephants and the potential of the dire wolf project offering coattails in engineering newfound biodiversity within American red wolf populations.
“This big shift has happened as we’ve also proven that we’re having real conservation outcomes,” Pask explains. “I talk at a lot of conservation conferences, and I think initially people were just really skeptical. They would always come up and be like, ‘I just don’t see how this is actually going to lead to conservation outcomes.’ And we kept on saying, ‘Here are all the things we’re projecting will happen.’ But I think now, as we’re actually achieving those goals and showing these things, people are going, ‘This is actually an important path forward.’”