Our Jurassic Park Future Is Almost Here. It’s Not Wondrous. It’s Sad.
Reading Time: 6 minutesPeople Always Ask Me if Jurassic Park Is Possible in Real Life. I’m Starting to Think the Answer Is Darkly Awful., The Montana Mountain King hybrids and Colossal Bioscience’s potential ‘mammoth’ aren’t about the animals., Montana Mountain King and de-extin
Strange as the 21st century is, I admit I didn’t imagine ‘cloned monster sheep’ is something we’d be dealing with.
On Tuesday, Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth pleaded guilty to a pair of felonies. He’d spent a decade creating what he called a ‘Montana Mountain King,’ a huge animal whose semen he allegedly sold to other sheep breeders so they could make their own hybrids suitable for trophy hunting on private ranches. I’m sure we’ll get a dramatic documentary series about all the lurid details eventually. But in the meantime, the bizarre case reminds me of something else: the well-publicized and often-lauded project to recreate a woolly mammoth, undertaken by a private biotech company called Colossal Biosciences. In these projects, we’ve already arrived at a Jurassic Park future we’re not prepared for.
The details of what headlines are calling the ‘frankensheep’ were laid out in a Justice Department press release earlier this week summing up court documents. Schubarth owns a 215-acre ‘alternative livestock ranch’—which makes me think of cattle in plaid button-downs listening to the Smashing Pumpkins. Between 2013 and 2021, with at least five co-conspirators, Schubarth imported ‘parts of’ Kyrgyzstan’s large, endangered Marco Polo argali sheep to the U.S., which he then sent to labs to create 165 cloned embryos. Schubarth then implanted those embryos in his ranch’s ewes. This ultimately resulted in one Marco Polo argali male, a species that can reach 300 pounds, and which does not belong in Montana. He called it the Montana Mountain King and used its semen to impregnate ewes to create various hybrids that would be sold to private hunting ranches. One of the offspring was sold for $10,000, and 11 more with a smaller share of the Mountain King’s genes brought in $13,200. You could say it was seedy as hell.
While all this has been playing out, we’ve received some new mammoth news, as well. For years, Colossal Biosciences has been promising that they’re plowing ahead with their de-extinction project, meant to bring woolly mammoths back to the Earth, despite ethicists, conservationists, paleontologists, and others repeatedly responding, ‘No, we do not want this.’ Earlier this month, the company claimed to have created induced pluripotent stem cells, which brings them a step closer to creating embryos that could be genetically modified to be mammothlike. Those would, in turn, be placed into living Asian elephant mothers to produce shaggy beasts unlike any seen in 4,000 years.
One of these genetic engineering projects was fundamentally illegal, and was aimed at creating bulky creatures so wealthy hunters could feel big by blowing holes in custom-made prey. The other, despite the misgivings of many experts, often gets positive press coverage. It’s marketed as a biotech moonshot to inspire people to care about biodiversity. And yet, it is also focused on creating a novel animal whose place in the world is likely to be restricted to private reserves. Both aim to create, but with apparently little thought to the cruelty of their plans.
The cruelty behind the creation of the Montana Mountain King and its offspring is self-evident. Schubarth and his co-conspirators illegally trafficked endangered wildlife to create cloned embryos that, given the success rate, obviously did not do very well inside their surrogate mothers. The single animal produced from the experiments was then used to impregnate other animals in what could only have been a ‘let’s see what happens’ approach in making designer prey that would have surely, had the wildlife traffickers not been caught, been continued to be refined and bred for large caliber guns. It’s an extremely convoluted and weird example of humans turning endangered animals into playthings.
The cruelty of the mammoth ‘de-extinction’ project is perhaps less obvious given the project’s science-y gloss. We know that people hunted woolly mammoths in the past, and overhunting by ancient cultures has often been raised as one of the pressures that could have driven mammoths into extinction. If so—the argument goes—we may then have an ethical responsibility to restore the beasts, by using modern biotechnology to create embryos that genetically resemble woolly mammoths and would be born as creatures that the public would generally recognize as mammoths. Further, paleontologists have long known that mammoths were ecosystem engineers that modified ancient habitats by where they walked, what they fed on, and the droppings they left behind, and so the new mammoths would potentially re-create habitat conditions that have dwindled since the Pleistocene. Make a mammoth, in other words, and the mammoth will reshape the land itself.
But Colossal’s project, too, uses an endangered species (in this case, the Asian elephant) to create what, despite all those lofty intentions, will probably end up being a trophy for humans to gawk at. The end result would be a mammoth in name only. Even Colossal co-founder and scientist George Church has noted that the creatures that the company is trying to create would not be mammoths as they were, but a kind of Mammoth 2.0, with some tweaks and adjustments to aid their survival. What Colossal aims to create is not Mammuthus primigenius, which we know from tusk and bone, but a designer animal unto itself—an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Mammoth! if you will.
What kind of lives would such engineered creatures really get to live? Aside from various legal ramifications of creating what may be a patented organism, what Colossal has never sufficiently wrangled with is the fact that there are no mammoths to teach their potential creations how to be mammoths—from what foods to eat and how to stay safe from predators to how to clear snow with their tusks. Woolly mammoths lived and died in the ancient past; their matriarchal lines are entirely broken by the permanence of extinction. Animals are not just bags of genes but are connected to the behavioral history of their species. That is something no amount of CRISPR manipulation can change. The mammoths would need to live in captivity, within fences or cordoned-off parks, and would be more gee-whiz examples of biotech than a species truly given a second shot at life on Earth.
The question I’m left asking then is ‘Why?’ In either case, why undertake such long-running and ill-advised projects to create a novel species when we have so many imperiled species around us today? Schubarth’s reasoning is easy enough to follow: machismo and money. Colossal, however, has largely evaded the question, stating that they see their efforts as a boon to conservation but without providing many specifics. The charitable read is that the seeming return of the mammoths would, indeed, inspire us to do a better job of caring for species that have not yet gone extinct. It would, if you squint, be a buzzy win for ‘conservation’ writ large.
But I think, should those new stem cells ever become embryos and then ‘mammoths,’ the reality is going to wind up more like Schubarth’s ranch, with mammothlike creatures existing in a kind of short-lived sideshow. The heyday of Mammuthus occurred when vast, frozen tundra spread across the Earth; we are in the middle of a climate change crisis that is unlikely to abate in our lifetimes.
Inadvertently and intentionally, we have made our planet hostile to megafauna. Our planet lost most of its large species between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, and even those that managed to survive the wave of extinction—gray wolves, jaguars, brown bears, pronghorn, and more—are constantly being penned in, walled off, hunted, and otherwise harassed by Homo sapiens. We have not learned to live alongside the great beasts that are still here—much less the ones that we create. I understand the fascination with seeing something big and impressive—my love of nature formed in halls of enormous Jurassic dinosaurs—but simply wanting megafauna back isn’t enough to make new ones, be they for literal trophies on the wall or as examples of what privatized science can do.
When I give talks about such creatures of the past, I’m often asked if I think we could see a real Jurassic Park one day. Until now, my answer has been no. DNA degrades too rapidly for us to ever even hope to get genetic material from a T. rex or Triceratops. But now I have to alter my answer. We’re not going to get toothy saurians of the past, but there are clearly some who are working in the spirit of InGen and John Hammond. Private reserves of privately owned, never-before-seen creatures may be an inevitability, and I can’t say I’m optimistic for what happens when those creatures meet a natural world that has no familiarity with what they are or what change they might bring. Envisioning the imitation mammoths, I’m not filled with wonder. My heart hurts at a future where a beast painstakingly created to revive the past may witness the extinction of the creatures who need our care now.
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