This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.In a remote corner of a laboratory in Dallas, scientists stare intensely at a tinamou egg resting on the counter. The tinamou, for the record, is a plump and endangered bird found in Central and South America that stands anywhere between six and 17 inches in height. It also remains the only living classified Palaeognathae with the ability to fly (other living relatives include the ostrich and emu). Yet it’s not strictly the creature’s living relatives that interests the scientists in the Avian Laboratory at Colossal Biosciences.Rather it’s the tinamou’s distant relation to the long-extinct and massive 12-foot great moa of New Zealand that has led Dr. Anna Keyte, the avian species director at Colossal, to explain why they’re taking blood samples from a turquoise egg on a warm Texan morning. Using razor-thin microneedles, scientists seek to extract DNA from an unborn tinamou embryo in the hopes of studying the creature’s genome. Ultimately, they’ll contrast its similarities and differences with the genome found in ancient moa bones that were donated to the company by filmmaker Peter Jackson.Colossal has done this type of research before with both ostrich and emu eggs. But while still considering the emu the best candidate to one day be a surrogate for a reborn (or reengineered) moa, the tinamou’s cellular embryo is proving the most promising for genetic editing. Perhaps on another morning, those same diminutive needles will insert a restored moa genome into another tinamou egg. In which case, like with the dire wolf before it, life will have found a way—with a little help from 21st-century biogeneticists.Not long ago, such a scene would be considered the stuff of science fiction; yet today it is just one of the wonders during a curated tour of intrigues at Colossal’s new headquarters, which is expected to have its grand opening later this month. Nearly every room in the sprawling campus appears designed to evoke amazement and a childlike need to touch that which has been lost, forgotten, or mythologized. An overhead projector decorates one hallway intended for tours with the miniature footprints of a dodo at one moment and then a woolly mammoth’s massive gait in the next. A teacher doing an early tour ahead of her students this fall visibly could not resist the joy of stomping along in the mammoth’s wake.All of this obviously has a ring of Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park about it, but that’s a comparison Colossal CEO Ben Lamm welcomes. The entrance to the offices and laboratories features a life-sized mammoth replica trapped in a model of glass-ice, keenly waiting to be shattered free; and the atrium in the building cheekily features a mosquito encased in a thin layer of amber (which, it should be noted, is not a good way to preserve DNA).There is an obvious element of showmanship to Colossal, but it’s accompanied by cold, hard, scientific results. That became apparent around the world in April when the company revealed it had successfully bred three dire wolves with the same genetic code as the legendary beast of the Pleistocene epoch, a massive apex predator that died out with the last ice age around 10,000 years ago.Some in the scientific community have debated whether a creature born from the edited genome of a gray wolf qualifies as the same species that vanished millennia past, but one does not need to be John Hammond to recognize the grandeur in proving irrefutably that the ancient dire wolf enjoyed a snow-white mane, and an appearance that would seem to give credence to the stories shared by Indigenous Americans and First Nation peoples about “the great wolf” of the North American plains.“I’ve spent 15 years working in animal care and conservation, so I had similar experiences where there was a highly anticipated birth, and you’re tracking every moment of the development,” says Matt James, the chief animal officer at Colossal, who worked at both the Dallas and Miami zoos before coming aboard. “You get sucked into it and you get very weeded, and lose the perspective of everything going on around you. This felt like any other one of those experiences until Romulus was the first one to come out. When Romulus was born, and I saw that flash of stark white—and remember wolves are typically born black—that was that holy shit moment. We’ve done it.”There is a burst of perhaps Mary Shelley-like excitement, but it’s swiftly followed by what James describes as a “sudden rush of urgent responsibility.” That responsibility is to the wolves that Colossal named Romulus and Remus—the first female of the dire wolf pack, Khaleesi, would be born later—but it is also a responsibility to a technology that Colossal intends to not only change de-extinction, but also to shift how we understand the nature of conservation itself.Life Finds a WayIn the four years since founding Colossal with George Church, a trailblazing geneticist and Harvard professor, one of the most surprising things to CEO Ben Lamm is how relatively quickly people accept the possibility of de-extinction, and that includes Lamm. Initially, the Texan entrepreneur did not reach out to Church to discuss mammoths or dire wolves. He was looking for background information on entering the field of synthetic biology and what he calls “directed evolution.” It was Church, when asked what he would invest in if money were no object, who flatly suggested, “I’d work to bring back the mammoth and other extinct species, and open-source those technologies for conservation.”A quick dive into Church’s background confirmed this was not a spur-of-the-moment fantasy; the geneticist has been publicly arguing the possibility for decades on everything from 60 Minutes to The Colbert Report. Furthermore, the deeper Lamm explored the terrain of biotechnology, the more unsolicited recommendations he got for working with Church.“I reached out to people in ancient DNA; I reached out to people in [comparative biology]; and I reached out to people in genetic engineering,” Lamm recalls. “They’re like, ‘It’s gonna be expensive, it’s gonna be really hard,’ but the general consensus was that it was possible, and all of them would end every conversation with ‘you should really talk to George Church, because he’s the one that has figured this out.’”Barely half a decade later, Lamm seems well situated from following that advice and his own instincts. A millennial mogul with a history in satellite and early A.I. investment, Lamm is as happy to talk about his own personal memories of Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond in Jurassic Park, or how the dire wolf artwork in his conference room deliberately evokes 1980s rock album covers, as he is the nitty-gritty of CRISPR tech.But it is that nitty-gritty that’s allowed for monumental breakthroughs this year, beginning with the revelation that Colossal engineered mice with the fur and fat compositions of a woolly mammoth, and those beloved dire wolves. Debates about the applications of de-extinction will continue, yet what the CEO is perhaps right to insist on is how overlooked the conservation element of Colossal’s mission tends to be.“We’re doing more conservation projects than de-extinction projects,” says Lamm, “but no one seems to—I shouldn’t say care—but it’s never a focus.” While the dire wolves might have broken TikTok, the fact that Colossal has also seemingly discovered a way to clone greater biodiversity for endangered red wolf populations tends to get buried (though the publishing of a scientific paper early next year is expected to greatly impact the conversation around that). Meanwhile, the company is also poised to make further headway in developing an mRNA vaccine to protect African and Asian elephants from Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV), a hemorrhagic disease which has an 80 percent fatality rate among Asian elephants.“When I joined Colossal, there were three projects that I was really passionate about from my history of losing elephants in human care, and one of them was EEHV,” James tells us. “We went and found [virologist Paul Ling], and it took us 13 months from the moment we invested in the project to the moment when we had the first trial. That’s an incredible representation of the scale and pace at which Colossal can work, and that’s been one of the most meaningful projects for me because I personally lost elephants to EEHV.”It is also a glimpse of the future Colossal wants to offer. Lamm says he thinks he’s failed, or only half-succeeded, if he doesn’t deliver on the promise of wonder that comes with de-extinction (which includes having a woolly mammoth calf by 2028), but the legacy of Colossal is intended to be more than just a Pleistocene nature preserve becoming a possibility one day.“We have 60 partners using our technologies,” Lamm says, “but I’d love for that to be hundreds of organizations and thousands of people using our technologies and making a difference from a conservation perspective.”James puts it more bluntly when describing his hopes for how de-extinction technology will improve the natural world.“It’s that Colossal has commoditized and democratized technology and these strategies for conservation to a point where now it’s an entire field,” James says. “It’s that we’ve changed the economics of conservation to make it profitable to be invested in the preservation of nature; that we’ve changed the way technology is deployed in order to protect species on the brink of extinction, and there are 15 or 20 species that have been restored from extinction and are making meaningful changes to ecosystems in the wild.”Still, like John Hammond attending to the birth of his velociraptors, neither James, Lamm, nor anyone else at Colossal appears unaffected by the wonderment of innovations that they can see and touch.“If there is a birth or a hatching that is happening, you can expect that I will force my way in and be there for every single one,” James laughs. “There is no feeling that you can really replicate than being there at the birth of those dire wolves. That is an addiction that I will probably have for the rest of my life.”The post Welcome to Pleistocene Park: The Inside Secrets of Colossal Biosciences appeared first on Den of Geek.