I have always had a thing for elephants. Growing up, my favorite Disney movie was Dumbo. The story of a bullied baby elephant overcoming adversity really resonated with me (plus, this was one of the few Disney movies in which the hero’s mom or dad not get killed in some horrible way, leaving him or her tragically orphaned. You can’t beat it!) As a child, many of my makebelieve games involved elephants (being them, being with them, riding on them, you name it), and any zoo visit had to include long periods of time at the elephant enclosure.Because I was also a dinosaur fan, my prehistoric interest naturally included the woolly mammoth, which checked all the boxes for me – giant, hairy, prehistoric and, of course, elephantine. I recall Saturday afternoons during which my brother and father would sit together building models of World War II airplanes, and I’d be nearby, happily assembling a plastic mammoth model. A woolly mammoth, I always thought, was way cooler than a B-29.So I was very excited when I recently read of new efforts to “revive” the woolly mammoth. George Church, a Harvard University genetics professor, has formed a company called Colossal whose mission is to bring back the woolly mammoth (or at least a close approximation thereof). He even got $15 million in funding for the project.Years ago, I had heard of efforts to clone mammoths and implant the embryos into Asian elephant surrogate moms to birth them. These attempts, however, were unsuccessful because of the lack of a fully intact mammoth genome, and I and all my fellow mammoth fans felt very let down.What’s currently being proposed is splicing bits of mammoth DNA recovered from frozen mammoth specimens with the DNA of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant. It is hoped that the resulting “mammophant” – admit it, that’s a cool name! – would both look and behave like a true woolly mammoth.Instead of using a surrogate elephant mother, the embryos would be grown in an artificial womb, which does lead me to wonder who would mother the little woolly critters after they’re born. Hey, maybe I can volunteer to foster one. I’m sure my husband and our three cats won’t mind a bit. After all, it would be the coolest pet on the block.The mammophants, the article continued, would live in Pleistocene Park – there really is such a thing ...
