A Texas "de-extinction company" Colossal Biosciences is one step closer to meeting its goal of bringing the Wooly Mammoth back from 10,000 years of non-existence.

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As a former child who begged to go to all Natural History museums, I am totally on board, but after knowing the project has already cost millions of dollars, asking the question, "But why?" is natural.

As a true-blue Texan, my first thought was the bounty of artic blubber-marbled meat.

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But then I remembered how intelligent the mammoth's descendants, the elephants, are and immediately felt guilty. Interestingly, it's those descendants that are the key to bringing the mammoths back.

A good amount of mammoth DNA has been recovered from the permafrost of the Arctic, however, there's not a complete sequence.

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So scientists have relied on elephant DNA to fill in the gaps but faced a unique-to-elephants problem: successful iPSC cell creation.

It's a little above my head but basically it is this: scientists needed to figure out how to unlock the potential of the elephant iPSC cell, which is a "single cell source that offers access to every other type of cell in a body, potentially allowing the creation of sperm and egg cells," because that's how you make new babies of anything.

Elephants proved trickier than say, mice.

They have now solved this problem, getting them closer to bringing back the mammoth, but again, why? For their luxurious fur?

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That feels wrong too. Perhaps for carnival rides?

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Actually the real reason is much more useful and intelligent than any of the above- it is to fill in the ecological niche Mammoths once held in the Arctic- one that could help tremendously with global warming.

Mammoths once trampled around the Arctic, controlling the vegetation of the area with their movements, their grazing, and their dung.

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Without the mammoth, the Arctic has become, "a waterlogged landscape of mossy tundra, shrubs and forest," instead of a grassland, which can store more carbon.

The thought is this: if we can bring back the "mammoth" (it will actually be a mammoth-like creature because it will be part modern elephant) they will restore the Arctic into a landscape that benefits the climate and therefore people.

Of course, there are all kinds of ethical questions- and practical things that could go wrong, but...

They are also working on Dodo birds and Tasmanian tigers (also to fill important ecological niches) and honestly, I just want the opportunity to pet all three.

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