EXCERPT

Maverick geneticist George Church, at Harvard University, has announced that he believes he is just two years away from creating a hybrid woolly mammoth embryo. The end goal is to develop a mammoth embryo into a fetus, and to take it to full term, he told New Scientist.

However, resurrecting a pure woolly mammoth this way is still many years away. First, Church's team is adding key genetic traits – such as shaggy long hair, thick layers of fat and cold-adapted blood – to the genome of the Asian elephant.