Ben Lamm, the CEO and co-founder of the technology firm Colossal Biosciences, does not want to play favorites with the company’s various de-extinction projects. One look around a newly finished headquarters in Dallas, Texas speaks volumes for how proud the company is about their dire wolf—or a functional recreation of the Pleistocene predator using the genetically-edited code of gray wolves to match the genome of the extinct creature of prehistory. And they have various projects, including the thylacine (the Tasmanian tiger), the dodo, and great moa of New Zealand, in various stages of development.

Still, at the end of the day, the one he seems most eager to cross the finish line remains the woolly mammoth, an animal which Colossal does not only wish to recreate by editing the genetics of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, but to also rewild—returning the furry giant to the arctic tundras that mammoths once roamed.

“I think that the mammoth conjures probably the most excitement,” Lamm muses inside a dire wolf-bedecked conference room. “Of anything we’re working on, it’s like people almost put it in the Jurassic Park age. It wasn’t, but people still have this view. We were making pyramids while mammoths were still here.”

Indeed, the last known mammoth population to walk the earth died out roughly 4,000 years ago, about six centuries after the Egyptians started putting up their monuments. It is a creature in (distant) human history, but one mythical enough to trigger the imagination. That myth is also what first made Colossal a reality after Lamm got inklings in the 2010s about George Church, a Harvard geneticist who made it a life’s dream to bring back the woolly mammoth. And according to Lamm today, they’re as close as a mere two years out from having that calf in the world.

“We’re certified by the American Humane [Society], we’re certified by Global Humane,” Lamm says. And they’re more than two and a half years into the process of working on oval egg retrieval in elephants—a crucial aspect in developing the IVF process for safely birthing a mammoth calf with an Asian elephant surrogacy that will last 22 months. “We’ve made a lot of progress on that one. I’m not announcing anything today, but I think we’re going to show some really interesting progress on that this year that people will get excited about, and which has huge applications to captive breeding programs and elephant conservation. [It will] ensure that this is repeatable, exciting, and impactful in a way that has no negative impacts on elephants.”

The founder further asserts once they can 100 percent confirm the transfer process of elephant embryos is safe, it could have an immediate impact in both the mammoth project and endangered elephant populations.

“[The limiting factor] won’t be a technology factor,” Lamm says, “it will be [getting] everyone around the table, including our animal rights partners, and everyone feeling we’re okay to put these in here. So I think they will.”

While Lamm is confident they’re “on track for 2028,” already the company is preparing for where mammoths would go in two years. Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, cryptically confirms that significant nature preserves have been earmarked with partners to rear mammoths.

“It’s a northern climate, not south, I can tell you that,” he chuckles. Additionally, the experience of studying the dire wolves in their own undisclosed captivity has helped James begin writing and rewriting animal care and rewilding manuals for a creature most associated with the Ice Age.

“I think a lot of the regulatory stuff has been really interesting for us, as we’re uncovering what are the regulatory pathways to eventual rewilding of a genetically modified animal,” James explains. “That’s something nobody’s ever done before, so even going through this exercise is more hypothetical with dire wolves, it has been really good about us finding the connections of the people that are sort of experts in those areas… that’s been really good for building our network of expertise, because this isn’t a thing that happens in a silo at Colossal. It’s going to take a whole village of people to help us develop these strategies.”

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.

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.’”

Right now, Pask is helping progress a genetically-engineered quoll—a small nocturnal, and extremely endangered marsupial in Australia—into becoming the first controlled release “ambassador project” in his native country where the Colossal quoll can help introduce the attributes needed to survive a changing habitat.

“I think people are much more accepting that we do have to take these kind of measures if we want to save biodiversity on our planet,” says Pask. “We absolutely have to. There is no other technology that can bring back lost biodiversity. You have to engineer it back in. It can happen over evolutionary time, but we would need hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years for some of these populations that we whittled down to 10 individuals to become healthy again. And they won’t. They’ll go extinct before that can happen. But we can bring those things back with conservation.”

Pask claims he’s achieved more tangible results in the past three years than in the 20 that preceded them. He likens such exciting progress to the world collectively driving full speed off a cliff and, having only now noticed there’s a path off the suicide ride, folks in the backseat are shouting, ‘No, no it’s too risky!’

But as his colleague Shapiro notes, choosing not to do anything due to risk-aversion is itself a risk that will invite dire consequences.

“The idea of de-extinction is exciting,” Shapiro says. “It brings new people in, brings new money into conservation. The money that’s gone to support Colossal would have otherwise gone to something like Bitcoin. Who knows? This is not money that would’ve supported traditional approaches to conservation. So I think it’s a huge win that Ben has been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and push it to developing tools for conservation.”

Right now the woolly mammoth is still at least two years away, but already benefits from researching how to replicate and rewild a mammoth are being implemented in living elephant populations.

“What’s crazy is all those works are helping elephants today,” says Lamm, “but selfishly we need all that to then build synthetic herds of mammoths and rewild mammoths. So we’re learning great things and helping today, but we’re also selfishly learning for our de-extinction project.”

Life finds a way, indeed.

The tooth-billed pigeon, which is sometimes referred to as “the little dodo” of the Pacific, is a variety of fowl indigenous only on the islands of Samoa. For more than a decade, it was also thought to be lost, if not outright extinct, after its last confirmed sighting occurred in 2013. That changed in 2025, though, when the Colossal Foundation—the conservation arm of the Texas technology company—introduced a new device to Samoa.

Described as a bioacoustics array derived from sound censors and a 360-degree camera mounted on top, this “classifier” is an AI-powered machine that has only begun to be deployed over the past 13 months at sites and national parks around the world. And according to Matt James, the chief animal officer of Colossal Biosciences as well as the executive director of the Colossal Foundation, it pinged the tooth-billed pigeon 43 times on its first deployment in Samoa alone.

“We know it’s out there,” James smiles while sitting across a conference room in Dallas. “So the next step [was] to get teams out there, go get eyeballs on them. And they’ve now seen them for the first time a month ago. It’s the first time in 13 years the bird’s been seen by a human, so the next step is can you begin to grab these animals and put them back into human care, so we can create captive breeding and release programs?”

That last bit might prove especially prudent considering one of the reasons the bird is virtually extinct is because an invasive breed of feral cat has flooded the island. It’s hardly an ideal situation, but according to the Colossal officer, it’s a chance to “bring them to human care, remove the cats, begin to build the population, and put them back in the wild, all because an AI tool is able to find it where nobody else could find it.”

It’s also a sample of work that might be less flashy than the de-extinction project that’s made Colossal famous after they brought a version of the dire wolf back from prehistory last year, but it has profound and immediate implications for species already here, from this relatively large pigeon in the South Pacific to elephants in Africa, and the much debated American gray wolf inside the continental U.S.

When we catch up with James, it’s during the recent grand opening of the Colossal Biosciences headquarters and laboratories in Dallas. We previously toured the campus last year when Colossal dominated social media with images of baby dire wolves—and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm remains adamant that the goal of having a woolly mammoth calf walking the earth again by 2028 remains on track. But it’s clear the technology company is at a pivot point following the last 12 months. The closest thing to a real-life Jurassic Park is now open to school tours, the world’s first permanent BioVault dedicated to preserving endangered or extinct genetic genomes is being established in Dubai, and as James muses, “[If] ’25 was about growth… ’26 is about delivery. It’s time.”

The foundation’s  “bioacoustics classifier” and the AI system it implements seems like one such device that can deliver sooner. Already its systems are being implemented in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where it is being used to monitor gray wolves, and in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, where it is intended to study and protect the African elephant.

“We’ve developed it and we just give it to our conservation partners for free,” James explains. “The hardware is a piece that we will buy for them and then deploy it.” In Yellowstone, they’ve already deployed 55 classifiers, which create a grid system monitoring five kilometers each. “They’re really far spaced out,” James continues, “you don’t need a ton of them to do that, and so for $55,000, you essentially can cover all of the world’s largest national park.”

First deployed at Yellowstone in January 2025, the devices work by remotely connecting with a cell network which uses bioacoustics that record the sound of an animal’s cry to build and analyze spectrogram data, deciphering what is, say, a gray wolf instead of a coyote. The goal is for Colossal AI engineers to match that with a machine-learning tool that is able to individually distinguish a specific elephant or gray wolf, or pigeon, from another with a single drone image. According to James, when the bioacoustics classifier was first tested, it had a 96 percent accuracy rate, and that score has only gone up since it’s been refined.

The applications for such tools also expand far beyond just finding hard-to-seek species. The plan is to enhance the study of living animals, as well as mitigate potentially dangerous encounters with humans.

“So we now have a tool that basically can look at drone imagery, track elephants, and say we know exactly who this elephant is,” James notes. “What it begins to create is ethogram data, so it’s telling you behaviorally what they are doing. Right now they’re muddying, they’re flapping their ears, they’re all directing their attention to one individual in the herd. So [in our] partnership with Save the Elephants in Samburu, that’s giving them a lot of data to work on management.”

He continues, “But if you think about one of the biggest issues with elephant conservation and wolf conservation, it’s conflict with humans. If you can begin to identify, basically, the troublemakers in each group, you can create early warning systems for cattlemen in Montana or for crop co-ops in Kenya and say, ‘Hey, just so you know, there’s a troublemaker in your area, you should be deploying your mitigation tools tonight and avoid some of the conflict that results in elephant or wolf death.’”

The technology has so far not actually been used to mitigate conflict between ranchers and gray wolves in the American West—one of the continued flashpoints which contributes to the ongoing debate about delisting the gray wolf as an endangered species in 44 states—yet the intent is there to both improve relations with those worried about wolves attacking livestock, as well as a general public that might still view the timber wolf as a nuisance or monstrous beast.

“I’m hoping it creates an opportunity to understand wolf language,” says James. “When we start talking about language, it’s a great way to anthropomorphize a species that’s severely persecuted, wrongfully persecuted. And if you can create some compassion for this species, hopefully you’re reducing some of the persecution. Cattlemen probably don’t really care for that part, but if we can say, ‘Hey, it’s a great conflict mitigation tool,’ they care about that. [Meanwhile] the mass public says, ‘Okay, well, maybe wolves aren’t as bad as we thought they were,’ and I think that’s the winning combination.”

The technology already exists, and in fact appears to be the tip of the spear in introducing AI tools into conservation efforts. After all, James muses that Abhishek Jana, a senior scientist working in the Colossal Foundation’s AI unit, retrofitted the bioacoustics tech from being a “bird classifier” to a wolf-based device in a single weekend. “We literally said on a Friday, ‘Hey, can you make a wolf classifier?’ And on Monday, I had an email where he said ‘try this.’”

It makes the mind wonder about the implications a decade from now.