What if it were possible to bring back an enormous prehistoric mammal?

And how do naked mole rats say hello?

Today we're talking creatures great and small.

I'm Bethany Van Delft.

It's Saturday, September 25th, and this is the 10 News Gets Extra.

10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5, 4, 3.0. 1.

If you are a big fan of the Ice Age movies, maybe you've wondered what it might be like

to hang with a real live

woolly mammoth. These cousins of the modern elephant, you know, the ones with huge tusks and

thick fur, haven't been gone that long. They lived as recently as 4,000 years ago. And now a new

bioscience company has said they're trying to bring them back using

genetic engineering. What? You heard me right. A company called colossal, which means huge,

has given themselves the really huge task of bringing back the mammoth by 2027. How will they do it?

With genetics. The idea for

colossal started in the laboratory of George Church, a biologist at Harvard. He, along with

researcher Dr. Ariona Hissili, used genetic tools they invented to pinpoint the differences

between a mammoth and their closest

living relatives the Asian elephant. What they found were 60 genes that controlled everything

from having more fat so mammoths can survive in the Arctic to the mammoth's distinctive

fur and domed head. So to bring back a mammoth, all they need to do is start

with the not-yet-born elephant, remove the genes that make it an elephant, and replace them with

those mammoth genes. Sounds easy, right? Uh, help? Not really. Their big idea also comes with huge problems to overcome. Mammoths are hard to work with because they're so big. To grow a baby mammoth in a test tube would take two years and it could weigh more than 200 pounds.

...