[imagesource: Goodfon]

Billionaire filmmaker Peter Jackson, best known for the popular Lord of the Rings film trilogy, has invested in a startup that has gained fame for trying to bring back extinct animals like woolly mammoths and the dodo.

Jackson joins a group of celebrity investors who have now already contributed a total of $235 million (R4 billion) to help Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences bring back the extinct creatures.

Other investors in the ambitious plan include actor Chris Hemsworth, heiress Paris Hilton, NFL legend Tom Brady, golfing great Tiger Woods, Legendary Pictures founder and technology billionaire Thomas Tull (producer of the movie “Jurassic World”), as well as venture capital firms like Winklevoss Capital Management.

Colossal Biosciences plans to rewrite elephant DNA with mammoth genes to create a mammoth-like embryo, with the goal of expanding this to edit and re-write DNA to restore or preserve several other extinct animals, like the Tasmanian tiger.

According to Bloomberg, investors in the company have “received returns through acquiring equity for Colossal spinoff companies that aim to help conserve other species”. So it’s not all altruistic.

In 2021, Ben Lamm, an entrepreneur, and George Church, a biologist well-known for his work on genetic sequencing and the Human Genome Project, started Colossal Biosciences to carry out Church’s protracted but sluggish endeavour to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

“It’s a special privilege to helm Colossal and be supported by visionaries, entrepreneurs and industry leaders.”

Lamm told Forbes that Jackson and his partner were “mission-aligned” and impassioned about “conservation and biodiversity restoration.”

Lamm reached billionaire status in 2021 when he sold a portion of his digital effects studio, Weta Digital, to Unity Software for $1.6 billion (R27 billion) in cash and stock.

Jackson will however not miss the ten bar he invested in the startup, having made millions with the Lord of the Rings films, during which he developed advanced custom software that could ​​generate and render images like the character Gollum and the Avatar movies’ blue-skinned aliens.

Since it is humans’ fault that dodos became extinct, it’s nice to see that their comeback is so well funded.

[source:forbes]