The mammoth isn't as gone as you think

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]10,000 [music] years ago, something walked off this Earth.

[00:00:05]8 tons of muscle, tusks 3 m long, a creature so [music] enormous the ground shook when it moved.

[00:00:15]The woolly mammoth was built for a world of ice.

[00:00:19]Its fur grew 70 cm [music] long, three layers of hair.

[00:00:24]Beneath its skin, a layer of fat 8 cm thick.

[00:00:29]A hump on its back, [music] pure energy stored for the winters that never ended. [music] But here is what should be impossible.

[00:00:40]Its blood was different from any elephant alive today.

[00:00:44]Special proteins delivered oxygen even [music] at 50° below zero.

[00:00:50]Blood engineered by evolution to flow through ice.

[00:00:56]>> [music] >> And then, they vanished.

[00:01:00]10,000 [music] years ago, the last of them fell silent.

[00:01:05]Some died from climate change.

[00:01:07]Some [music] died from us.

[00:01:11]But their DNA did not die [music] with them.

[00:01:15]Frozen inside their tusks, in Siberian permafrost, [music] the code survived.

[00:01:22]1.2 million [music] years old, the oldest animal DNA ever recovered.

[00:01:29]>> [music] >> In a laboratory in Dallas, Texas, scientists are rewriting the genome of an Asian elephant.

[00:01:36]Shaggy hair, small ears, curved tusks, cold-adapted blood.

[00:01:43]85 [music] genes, one extinct giant.

[00:01:49]Their target, [music] 2028.

[00:01:52]For the first time in history, an animal we drove [music] extinct is coming home.

[00:01:59]Not by accident.

[00:02:01]Not by evolution. [music] But because we decided that some things should not stay gone.