The CIA has invested in new technology to help resurrect species not seen on the Earth for more than 10,000 years.
US firm Colossal Biosciences has set its sights on reintroducing woolly mammoths, giant herbivores which roamed the planet for tens of thousands of years before dying out.
The firm’s public portfolio shows its new investor is In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the American spy operation.
Colossal says bringing the mammoth back from extinction will help in the fight against climate change.
Adding the firm to existing partners in intelligence and weapons, In-Q-Tel wrote in a blog post: “Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth and other species?
“Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.
“Perhaps more importantly, leadership in biotechnology will allow the U.S. to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards for the use of this technology.
“How we employ the potentially staggering power of biotechnology to shape the planet and humanity itself will matter as much as our ability to do so.”
Others who have invested in the firm include billionaire Peter Thiel as well as Paris Hilton.
Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, technology and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm and world-renowned geneticist Dr George Church, says it “has the DNA, the technology and will have the woolly mammoth alive again.”
Its website reads: “Some of these megafauna are still with us but far too many have gone extinct.
“The impacts of this are mega-sized. Megafauna typically are apex predators and thus affect the entire food chain.
“They stomp out or eat invasive vegetation, pack certain harmful gases back into the turf, or in some instances kick up the earth and distribute nutrients. Their roles in the health of a given ecosystem can not be overstated.
“Colossal’s landmark de-extinction project will be the resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth - or more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the Woolly Mammoth.
“It will walk like a Woolly Mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the Mammoth’s extinction.
“This core value cannot be overstated, the woolly mammoth is a vital defender of the Earth.”
Earlier this year a gold miner hit the jackpot when he stumbled upon a mummified woolly mammoth which lived 35,000 years ago.
The young Canadian uncovered the frozen beast while digging through the permafrost at Eureka Creek in Alaska , US.
Dr Grant Zazula, palaeontologist for the Canadian territory of Yukon said: “She’s perfect and she’s beautiful.”
