Two hundred years is a long time. It’s older than basketball, older than the light bulb — and roughly how long it’s been since anyone has seen a bluebuck alive. Now, a team of scientists wants to change that.
Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotech company that made headlines last year after engineering three dire wolf pups using 13,000-year-old DNA, announced its latest de-extinction project this week: the bluebuck, a silvery blue-gray antelope that once roamed the grasslands of South Africa. The species was driven to extinction around 1800, making it the first large African mammal to disappear in modern history.
"When we are successful, it will mean we have brought back a species that has not walked this earth for hundreds of years," Colossal reproductive biology scientist Darya Tourzani said in a YouTube video shared on Monday, April 27.
The company's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, added that the team is "making incredible progress at a rate that I couldn't have predicted."
Colossal has built the kind of roster that makes the whole thing feel less like a lab and more like a blockbuster. Early investor Tom Brady told Newsweek he “had to be involved” after meeting the founders, and he’s not alone — Chris Hemsworth and his brothers are also on board, while Peter Jackson is partnering with the company on a separate effort to bring back the moa in New Zealand.
"Entrepreneurship is a team sport, like the Avengers,” founder Ben Lamm said in a statement. “You want Hulk in your army, but you also need Thor."
The bluebuck is the latest addition to Colossal's de-extinction roster, which also includes the woolly mammoth (targeting a live calf by late 2028), the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the northern white rhino.
At the World Governments Summit earlier this year, Lamm called bringing back extinct species “the most exciting thing in 2026.”
