Colossal attempt to resurrect Tasmanian tiger, extinct since 1930s

DALLAS • A Dallas-based company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth has announced a new initiative to bring back the Tasmanian tiger, or the thylacine, a marsupial declared extinct in the 1930s.

Colossal Biosciences was started by Harvard geneticist George Church and technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm in September last year with US$15 million (S$21 million) in seed funding.

The company raised another US$60 million six months after launching despite doubts over the feasibility of resurrecting extinct species. Winklevoss Capital Management, motivational speaker Tony Robbins and Paris Hilton are among its investors.

Executives at Colossal claim that by bringing back the thylacine, which was once widespread across mainland Australia and the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea, they can aid in efforts to re-balance Australian ecosystems that have suffered decades of sustained biodiversity loss.

The Tasmanian tiger was unique among marsupials with its iconic wolf-like appearance and fresh meat diet. It was a quiet animal with thick black stripes on its body and, fully grown, measured about 1.8m from its nose tip to the tip of its tail.

Thylacines were hunted to extinction by European settlers who thought of them as a threat to Tasmania's sheep industry.

Colossal plans to take cells from the thylacine's closest living relatives, like the dunnart, and genetically engineer them with thylacine DNA.

"You're putting all of those genomic changes into that living cell, and then in the end, you are left with a cell that is a thylacine cell, and you can turn that cell then back into a whole living animal," said Dr Andrew Pask, an evolutionary biologist who is leading Colossal's efforts to revive the animal.

Similarly, Colossal would combine genetic material from Asian elephants with frozen woolly mammoth DNA to bring back a version of the latter species.

Not all experts are convinced by Colossal's plans. Critics have called such experiments a distraction and say that if they succeed their effects on the climate and ecosystems would be unpredictable.

"If you have a million (genetic) differences between an elephant and a mammoth, you can't necessarily change any one of those without there being a problem," said Dr Thomas Gilbert, a paleo-geneticist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

BLOOMBERG