Euronews.green writes that the company's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, plans to bring back the wooly mammoth by 2028 or sooner by modifying the genes of existing elephant cells. “I don’t want to break hearts on this but I do not believe it's possible to bring back a dinosaur”, he said, suggesting that not every extinct species will set foot once again on Earth.

This is probably for the better, as a walking T-Rex is the last thing we would want. The company did secure a total of 235 million USD to make this sci-fi goal a reality, as well as to power biodiversity projects and nature restauration projects a reality worldwide.

Some experts say that protecting several key species of animals, such as the African forest elephants and the American bison, could help us significantly in our mission to capture and store carbon emissions, so rewilding is definitely a key benefit of Colossal's work. At the same time, compared to tech-based climate solutions, nature-based projects hold a greater share of the pledges made by companies and governments, at 66%.

“I think we've got to figure out new technologies, cleaner technologies, but we've also got to figure out ways that we can leverage technology to empower nature to do what it was already designed to do better than we're going to do through technology", Lamm said.

But how would the wooly mammoth help us? Theoretically, this species could help us turn the Arctic tundra into the grass-filled steppe that it was during the last Ice Age, making it an important carbon sink.

“We’ve seen certain models like in Pleistocene Park where the right density of herbivores can lead to a nitrogen-oxygen cycle that starts to replenish those grasslands”, Lamm explains, pointing at efforts conducted by Russian scientists to restore the Arctic steppe.

Some researchers raised concerns over whether bringing back an extinct species would even work, as the time that went by since they were gone definitely changed the landscape.

The CEO of Colossal explains that his team won't bring back an exact replica of the mammoth, but rather, a hybridized version of an elephant that is adapted to cold environments.

“It’s not like we go make 1,000 animals and open the gates and cross our fingers and hope it works", he said. "Those plans will take just as long as the engineering of the animals themselves - maybe in some cases more.”