Is this ‘de-extinction’ project actually onto something?

Dallas-based genetics and biotech startup Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists, the CIA, and Peter Thiel, among others. Its buzzy “de-extinction” projects aim to “bring back” lost animals like the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dire wolf — although it isn’t creating copies of extinct creatures from ancient DNA, as the “de-extinction” tagline may suggest. In the case of the “dire wolves” presented to the world in 2025, the pups were gray wolves spliced with a few genetic traits to somewhat resemble the dire wolves. This ambitious branding opened the company up to questions about its conservation efforts and criticism for apparently not really “de-extincting” anything at all.

Colossal’s latest “de-extinction” project, announced in April, seems to represent something of an adjustment to its public-facing strategy. It’s focused on a plan for the bluebuck, a species of South African antelope that went extinct around 1800. Colossal CEO Ben Lamm was quick to say that the technology developed for the project can already be used in conservation efforts — and it will be made available as a resource outside of the company.

“We made enough progress [that] some of those technologies could be immediately applicable to antelope conservation — and about 30 percent of antelopes are threatened with extinction,” Lamm told The Verge. “Everything that we do that has application to conservation, we open source for free to the world.”

The technologies in question largely focus on facilitating reproduction and what Lamm described as “a completely novel technique” for collecting and aspirating oocytes from live animals. He described this procedure of harvesting immature egg cells as “ovum pickup” where researchers “literally use an ultrasound and a needle to go into a live animal’s ovary and flush out the eggs.”

One of the criticisms leveled at Colossal has been that the announcements involving extinct species draw attention away from ongoing efforts to save critically endangered species that still exist. This sort of criticism intensified significantly after the dire wolf announcement.

Ecologist Douglas McCauley, who has lived and worked in East Africa while contributing to antelope conservation efforts in the region, co-authored an editorial about Colossal’s dire wolf project in Time magazine in 2025. The piece called the pups “mutants” and argued that “the challenge with so-called ‘de-extinction’ efforts is that … they actually pull the spotlight away from one of the gravest crises on the planet: the accelerating decline and extinction of nature.”

McCauley told The Verge that he still stands by this assessment. “The possibility that both funding and the attention of policymakers could be rerouted to making these … mutant creations, that’s really undermining our capacity to deal with what is at the heart of a species extinction crisis.” (Lamm rejects this argument: “We don’t think that education and excitement around ‘de-extinction’ [are] diametrically opposed to saving species. We think that they can go hand in hand.”)

With that said, McCauley is cautiously optimistic about the technologies developed for Colossal’s latest project. He says that the ovum pickup technique, in particular, has potential uses in many scenarios, because one of the recurring challenges in species preservation efforts is finding ways to harvest eggs from living animals for reimplantation. What Colossal describes, McCauley says, looks like “a very useful, exportable technology that could be used before a species goes extinct.”

Beyond reproductive technologies, Colossal’s press material also trumpets a “global biobanking” initiative, with the aim of preserving the genetic records of existing at-risk species for future generations of scientists. McCauley says Colossal’s policy of making its genomes and technologies available for conservation efforts is “a really great best practice,” and says of the biobanking initiative that “the more of these kinds of repositories, the better.”

Of course, as before, Colossal still has to contend with its reputation for exaggerating its scientific research. Previously, the scientific community questioned the idea of de-extinction — what amounts to first sequencing a genome of the extinct animal, identifying the core genes that gave the species its unique characteristics, and editing them into the genome of a modern animal that’s closely related to the extinct one. Critics have argued that this is not a re-creation of the extinct species but a new, hybrid species, and that it’s disingenuous — or even dangerous — to suggest otherwise.

Lamm said that he sees two guiding principles behind his company’s focus on splashy “de-extinction” efforts. One is developing versatile and resilient techniques with many other applications: These challenges “force you to build an end-to-end synthetic biology pipeline that is hardened on difficult use cases.” The other is that it’s easier to attract attention — and, Lamm admits, funding. Lamm argues that this attention is a positive thing. “If you can use ‘de-extinction’ as a way to undo the sins of the past,” he said, “to bring [an animal] back and use that as a lightning rod moment for conservation and science, maybe you’ll get kids that [see that] and say, ‘I want to be a scientist.’”

McCauley remained unconvinced. “Look,” he said, “I’m not a trad conservationist. I think we … need to be using the very best technologies — and sure, some of those [technologies] are what Colossal is using and improving on in this toolkit. But I think we need to use them intelligently. I don’t know that I agree that what [Colossal] is doing is contributing to an effort that’s creating more attention. It feels like it’s creating more distraction.”