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Colossal Biosciences, the company behind a genetically engineered dire wolf, that is working toward modern hybrids of the woolly mammoth, dodo and Tasmanian tiger, is turning its attention to Africa’s extinct species.
Today the Dallas-based company announced it has been secretly working to resurrect the bluebuck, a majestic antelope that’s been extinct for around 200 years.
Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences CEO, told CNN that the move would be “reversing some of the sins of the past.”
The bluebuck, also known as the blue antelope, once roamed Southern Africa and is the only large African mammal species to die out in recorded history. Its demise was rapid and is commonly attributed to hunting during the colonial era, habitat loss and competition for grazing areas with livestock.
“This is a clear example of an extinction that is our fault, and that we have the technology now, and can develop the technology within the next several years, to reverse,” said Colossal chief science officer Beth Shapiro.
The antelope is Colossal’s first foray into bovids, a group of animals with cloven hoofs and horns that also includes cattle, goats and buffalo. It is also Colossal’s first project centered on mainland Africa (the company’s dodo project involves work in Mauritius).
Efforts began in 2024. The biotech company extracted DNA from a bluebuck specimen in the Swedish Museum of Natural History to piece together the species’ genome. From this, scientists have deciphered which genetic variants express the antelope’s key physical traits, including its blue-gray pelt, white patch in front of the eyes and long curved horns.
Colossal says its analysis confirmed the sable and roan antelope are the bluebuck’s closest genetic relatives. It is using the roan as a cellular surrogate, editing roan DNA to bring it closer to the bluebuck’s appearance — a process that is underway.
The project will use a roan antelope as a surrogate mother for the laboratory-grown embryo. The company has already acquired roan for this purpose. The gestation period is nine months.
The CEO said he anticipates the birth of a specimen in “the coming years” rather than decades. Colossal said the bluebuck would require more gene editing than the dire wolf, but less than several of its other projects. For the dire wolf, Colossal said it made 20 edits in 14 genes.
Lamm said Colossal was announcing the project now as it has achieved a series of breakthroughs that he believes could apply to endangered antelope species such as the critically endangered hirola. “We felt like we were doing a disservice to antelope conservation by sitting on (them),” he said.
One breakthrough is the successful ovum pickup of roan antelope. Ovum pickup (OPU) is a method of egg collection and a key step for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Another breakthrough is the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from roan antelope — reprogrammed adult cells returned to a stem-cell-like state, which can be turned into other tissue types. Colossal says both are world firsts for roan antelopes.
“We’ve made enough progress in technologies that can be now immediately applied,” Lamm said. “We’re very happy for people to contact us if they want to learn the protocols that we’ve used to make these iPSCs, for example.”
There are 29 endangered antelope species worldwide, including the critically endangered dama gazelle, hirola and addax, all native to Africa. Many populations are shrinking due to habitat loss, among other factors. For some endangered species, population fragmentation and a lack of genetic diversity is a concern for their long-term prospects.
Dr. David Mallon, visiting professor at the Department of Natural Sciences at Manchester Metropolitan University, and emeritus chair of the antelope specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature/Specialist Survival Commission, who’s not connected with the project, described it as “an extremely interesting development” and said the bluebuck was “the obvious species to choose from among the antelopes.”
But he queried the value of the venture to ongoing conservation efforts: “I think there’s a question of how much of this would be seen as a conservation priority, and I think the answer is ‘not a lot.’”
“(It’s) a very interesting scientific experiment, but there are far higher conservation priorities to be solved,” he said.
“A huge amount of money is being spent on these operations — which are of clearly great scientific interest — but a lot of people I think would feel that the money would be better spent on trying to prevent some species in big trouble from really going extinct.”
Recent successes in antelope conservation have come through captive breeding and reintroduction, he added. These include the Arabian oryx, which returned to the Arabian Peninsula in 1982, and the scimitar-horned oryx, which was declared extinct in the wild in 2000 but was successfully reintroduced to Chad. Its population has grown so much the IUCN upgraded the oryx from critically endangered to endangered in 2023.
The antelope specialist also queried whether Colossal’s bluebuck would have a natural, functional ecosystem to return to.
According to the African Wildlife Foundation, the roan antelope, for example, has lost large parts of its range through human habitation and agricultural expansion. Even in protected national parks in Kenya and South Africa it has struggled in recent years.
Lamm said, as with its other projects, the company is building a collaboration with conservationists, private landowners, government stakeholders and educators to forge a reintroduction plan for Colossal’s bluebuck.
Colossal has not made public where it plans to reintroduce species, though Lamm said it would be part of the bluebuck’s historic range in Southern Africa, and is working with the Endangered Wildlife Trust.
While Colossal refers to the project as “de-extinction,” critics have pointed out that is technically impossible. Following the company’s dire wolf announcement in 2025, Dusko Ilic, professor of stem cell science at King’s College London, called the animal a “synthetic proxy,” designed to mimic the dire wolf’s physical traits. An animal’s learned behaviors and ecological niche were another matter, and he described “de-extinction” as an “illusion.”
Shapiro herself told CNN in 2024, “once a species is lost, it’s gone.”
Skepticism has not stopped Colossal Bioscience from attracting a swarm of investors, including celebrities such as director Peter Jackson, socialite Paris Hilton, former professional football player Tom Brady and professional golfer Tiger Woods. The company, which was founded in 2021, received $555 million in funding by September 2025, according to Bloomberg.
Colossal was founded by Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church in 2021, when the start-up announced its plan to bring back the mammoth in some form by genetically modifying an Asian elephant. Lamm told CNN at the time it aimed to have the first calves within four to six years.
The company has since announced similar efforts to resurrect approximations of the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, dodo, and the giant moa, a flightless bird that once lived in New Zealand. In 2025, it revealed what it described as the birth of three dire wolf pups created by altering the genetic makeup of the gray wolf. However, it did not first make that project public.
Lamm argued that with each “de-extinction” announcement the company created a “halo effect of awareness of biodiversity loss,” and hopes to shift public opinion on conservation needs.
“De-extinction is not the answer. It’s just an answer in a much larger field,” he said. “We need innovation across all of conservation.”