The science isn’t the first thing you see when you enter the lab at Colossal Biosciences on the outskirts of Dallas. It’s theatrical. On a fictitious stone cliff, a life-size animatronic dire wolf scans an imaginary horizon by shifting its head every few seconds. A model mammoth is covered in a fog of dry ice. At the door, reporters’ phones are confiscated. It’s obvious that someone has given careful thought to what it would be like to walk into the future of biology.
The fact is that it functions. Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and a valuation of more than ten billion dollars with the narrative that the woolly mammoth, which has been extinct for about four thousand years, will be walking around again in two years. Tiger Woods is a financier. Paris Hilton is as well. Three dire wolf pups, born in 2025, were altered from gray wolf embryos by changing 14 genes out of about 19,000, according to the company’s first victory. Depending on who you ask, that may or may not qualify as “de-extinction”; many scientists outside the building would disagree.
| Company Profile | Details |
|---|---|
| Company Name | Colossal Biosciences |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Headquarters | Dallas, Texas |
| Co-Founder & CEO | Ben Lamm |
| Chief Science Officer | Beth Shapiro |
| Valuation | $10.2 billion (as of 2026) |
| Lab Size | 55,000 square feet |
| Staff | Around 260 scientists |
| Core Technology | CRISPR gene editing, cloning, AI |
| First Major Milestone | Three dire wolf pups born in 2025 |
| Mammoth Target Date | Within two years (by 2028) |
| Notable Investors | Tiger Woods, Paris Hilton, among others |
| Other De-Extinction Targets | Tasmanian tiger, dodo, bluebuck |
The comparisons to Jurassic Park don’t bother 44-year-old CEO Ben Lamm. He extends an invitation to them. His employees have been seen wearing heavy-metal-style T-shirts that read “Direwolf – original tour 8500BC, encore performance 2025,” and there are statues of a brontosaurus and a mammoth in his office.It’s marketing as much as science, and it’s difficult to ignore how neatly the two have been combined. That is both unquestionably effective and a little unsettling.
A few hallways down, the real work takes place. Chief Science Officer Beth Shapiro puts on blue rubber gloves and shows how mammoth DNA is extracted from a two-foot piece of tusk that was found in Siberian permafrost. The fragment resembles a piece of driftwood rather than a tooth. The bone appears nearly new where she scrapes. The genetic material resides there. The next step is to compare the mammoth’s genome to that of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, and edit for the characteristics of cold climates, such as the shaggy coat, fat layer, and small ears.
Numerous critics contend that the project as a whole is more in line with performance than science. They claim that an elephant with mammoth-like features isn’t a mammoth, and a gray wolf with 14 altered genes isn’t a dire wolf in any meaningful sense. The more difficult question, which Lamm frequently ignores, is what you do with these animals after they are created. In what location do they reside? Who makes the decision? Perhaps the most honest part of the pitch is the conservation argument, which suggests that these tools could save endangered species. Another possibility is that the entire thing collapses and becomes an expensive zoo exhibit.
Even though it’s not exactly what the marketing says, there’s a sense that something truly new is happening here as you watch this from outside the building. The smaller question may be whether the first calf born in 2027 or 2028 is actually a mammoth or just an elephant in a sweater. The more important question is whether de-extinction becomes a viable business strategy and what will be revived next.
