The living achievement is the Colossal woolly mouse, as the company has dubbed it.
The last mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago.
The hairy proboscideans were close relatives of the mastodon and extant elephants.
Three genetically edited mice in the hands of a Colossal researcher.Photo: Colossal Biosciences
Colossal scientists generated the woolly mice by simultaneously editing seven genes in the animals genetic code.
Thus, the animals hair grew up to three times longer than in unedited rodents.
All of these different variants have never occurred together in the same mouse, Shapiro said.
Two of the mice in an enclosure, a toy woolly mammoth at right. Photo: Colossal Biosciences
Hopefully we were going to get something that was really, really woolly.
An ultra woolly mouse.
When the team found some genes associated with woolly phenotypes in mice, they added them.
For the sake of this research, a shaggy, cold-resistant rodent was the goal.
It is a proxy species, or an animal that stands in for the real thing.
Lamm and Shapiro told Gizmodo that Colossal would have more updates before the year was out.
Just because you have a hairy elephant doesnt mean you have a mammoth, VanEenennaam added.
Lamm said a stripy dunnart may come along at some pointprobably the coolest looking dunnart ever, he noted.
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