Colossal Biosciences opened its 55,000-square-foot Dallas lab to press tours this week. The company is privately held, but says it has already raised more than $600 million and was valued at $10 billion during a financing round in early 2025. The milestone deliverable so far: gene-edited woolly mice with long, shaggy, tawny-toned fur, developed using a mix of mammoth-like and known mouse hair-growth mutations. The company calls this a step toward functional de-extinction. A University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist calls it something else entirely: "They're making genetic changes in an Asian elephant that gives that Asian elephant the superficial appearance of being a mammoth. That's not de-extinction; that's genome engineering."
Both of those things can be true at once. The science is genuinely interesting. The conservation framing is not honest.
Colossal has stated that it wants to have woolly mammoth hybrid calves by 2028, and wants to reintroduce them to the Arctic tundra habitat. That timeline requires a first embryo transfer into a surrogate Asian elephant sometime this year, a successful 22-month gestation, a viable birth, then years of behavioral study before any reintroduction. Colossal now aims to produce its first mammoth-like calves by 2028, and the company acknowledges that the timeline is ambitious, particularly given the elephant's two-year gestation period. The gap between "our first mammoth" and "the Arctic has been ecologically restored" is where the real story lives, and nobody at Colossal is telling it.
What a $10 Billion Valuation Actually Tells You
I do not think Colossal is a fraud. I think it is a venture-backed biotech company doing what venture-backed biotech companies do: it has built a compelling brand around a charismatic outcome, attracted serious capital, and is now generating spinoffs and patent applications to justify the valuation. Colossal not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth, it wants to patent it. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. A company that patents the animal it claims to be conserving is not a conservation company. It is a company that found a brilliant way to monetize a conservation story.
Here is what the numbers actually look like. A 2025 PNAS analysis of nearly 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years found that approximately 6% of species identified as threatened were supported by conservation funds, while 29% of the funding was allocated to species of "least concern." We are systematically underfunding the species that are dying right now, in favor of the ones that are either already gone or already safe. A 2015 study cited in recent literature found it costs a mean of $1.55 million to protect one endangered species. The $200 million Colossal raised in its Series C alone could instead protect up to 95,000 animals, including all 10,787 endangered or critically endangered species on the IUCN Red List. That math does not make the case for woolly mice.
The counterargument matters, and I want to be fair to it. De-extinction is often criticized for siphoning funds from classical conservation, yet quantitative evidence remains scarce. One analysis found that every dollar invested in de-extinction originated from private sources and coincided with a net rise in public and NGO conservation budgets, suggesting de-extinction mobilized new money rather than displacing existing capital. I am not dismissing that finding. I am noting that it does not settle the question of where attention goes, and attention is not a neutral resource.
The Tool Is Real. The Story Around It Is Not.
There is a risk that de-extinction efforts will disproportionately focus on charismatic species, driven by their ability to attract funding and public attention. The mammoth is the most charismatic species possible. It is prehistoric, enormous, and photogenic in a way that a critically endangered Panamanian golden frog is not. When Colossal announces woolly mice, it generates global press coverage. When the IUCN updates its Red List, it generates a paragraph on page 12.
The CRISPR toolkit Colossal is building has genuine conservation applications. Revive and Restore has already focused most of its attention on endangered species in need of genetic rescue, like the black-footed ferret and the Przewalski's horse. That is what this technology should be doing right now. Not recreating something that has been extinct for 10,000 years while wildlife populations have declined 73 percent since 1970 and one million species are currently threatened with extinction.
The engineering says: build the genome-editing capability, deploy it for living species in the next decade, and stop calling the press release a conservation milestone. The mammoth will still be extinct in 2035. The species that need this technology today will not wait.
