Can the woolly mammoth be brought back from extinction?

Scientists say they will be able to grow a woolly mammoth embryo within two years, using DNA extracted from 42,000-year-old remains found frozen in Arctic permafrost.

While the quality of the DNA has deteriorated over the years, US scientists from Harvard University are confident they can combine key mammoth genes with DNA from an Asian elephant, its closest modern day counterpart.

Using cutting-edge technology, they will insert key traits from the historic animal, such as giant tusks and a shaggy coat, into an elephant embryo.

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The resulting hybrid will then be grown in an artificial womb.

Professor George Church, leading the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, said: "We're working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab."

The team hope the experiment will ultimately create a living creature which is "like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits", Sky News reports.

Church said: "We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years."

Mammoths roamed Eurasia and northern America, then mostly a cold, grassy steppe, for centuries – evidence shows they co-existed with early humans, who used them for food and to make bone tools and jewellery.

However, the end of the last ice age, around 11,700 years ago, wrought destructive changes to their habitat and within a few thousand years, the mainland population was extinct, although an isolated mammoth colony on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Sea, is thought to have died out as recently as 4,000 years ago.

If the Harvard project is successful, says The Independent, it "could give rise to the rebirth of a range of creatures that have died out".