The entrepreneur claims that the long-extinct woolly mammoth will be brought back in just 4 years

This can get hairy.

The high-tech company is confident that extinct beasts dating back to the Ice Age – such as the woolly mammoth – could be revived by 2028, all thanks to funding provided by Hollywood stars such as Paris Hilton and Chris Hemsworth.

Start-up Colossal Biosciences, which describes itself as “the world's first de-extinction company,” is developing a way to revive “essential” genes from long-extinct animals including the mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. The Independent newspaper reported.

The Texas-based company has raised more than $235 million from celebrity backers like motivational speaker Tony Robbins and PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel — plus, in a wild twist, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)according to The Intercept website.

Its CEO, Ben Lamm, likened the operation in an interview to “Jurassic Park in reverse.” With the Daily Mail.

“We have set a date of late 2028 for our first mammoth, and we are on track to achieve that currently, which is great,” Lam told The Independent, noting that reviving the prehistoric giant would require a 22-month gestation period.

“But since other species have a much shorter gestation period, it is very likely that we will see another species before the mammoth.”

To that end, the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in the early 1980s, will take “only weeks” to revive, and the dodo, which was last seen in the 17th century, will need about one month, according to CV Chief.

“I think it's very likely that we will have a species before 2028, and it will be one of the three species you're looking at,” he added.

Although the mammoth became extinct nearly 4,000 years ago, the large beast – which weighed 6 tons – shared 99.5% of its genes with the Asian elephant. The gene editing and stem cells will be combined with an Asian elephant egg from a healthy female of the species.

“We're not taking mammoth DNA and plugging holes,” Lam told the Daily Mail, referring to the disastrous operation depicted in Michael Crichton's 1990 science fiction novel Jurassic Park and in the subsequent film series. “We are trying to engineer missing genes from mammoths to Asian elephants.”

The company specifies that Resurrection will be “more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all the basic biological traits of a woolly mammoth.” According to a statement on its website.

“It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, and sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to live in the same ecosystem that was previously abandoned after the extinction of the mammoth.”

Additionally, if the creature returns to Arctic environments, this species could be a source of environmental exposure, the company claimed.

“It could help reverse rapid climate warming and, more urgently, protect Arctic permafrost,” according to the Colossal website, which emphasizes that the layer is “one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.”

“Bringing back the woolly mammoth means bringing back a better Earth.”

However, while the movie Colossal promotes the possibility of bringing back the dodo and other long-extinct animals, academics have dubbed the idea theater.

“De-extinction is fantasy science,” said Jeremy Austin, director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA. He told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2022. “The extinction of the mammoth has more to do with media interest in scientists than with the practice of serious science.”

But Lahm will not let his dreams die due to doubts.

“Critics who say that removing genetic extinction to create replacement species is impossible are simply critics who are not fully informed and do not know the science,” he told The Intercept at the time.

“We have made it clear from day one that on our path to de-extinction, we will develop technologies that we hope will be beneficial to both human health care and environmental conservation.”

Earlier this week, Phenomenal Bioscience announced that it was formed A non-profit organization to focus on “conservation initiatives.”

The initiative will use the company's technologies to “revolutionize wildlife conservation and rapidly restore the ecosystem,” according to a statement.

Partnerships with external organizations will focus on species that could benefit from genetic rescue, biobanking, and the creation and use of reference genomes. Additional emphasis will be placed on accelerating species adaptation, creating genetic resilience through biotechnology, finding lost species, and using technological advances to Including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational biology to advance our understanding of animal behavior and ecosystems.