Could elephants and mammoths interbreed? Could there have been a 'mammophant'?

Historical interbreeding between modern-day elephants and woolly mammoths was not necessarily impossible, but it is highly improbable it ever happened for a number of reasons.

The first significant factor is the two species (and in elephant terms, we’re talking Asian elephants, because African elephants were of course restricted to Africa) almost certainly never met, even though they overlapped in time, with mammoths only going extinct some 4,000 years ago.

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While both mammoths and Asian elephants lived on Asia, that is an enormous landmass, and mammoths were creatures of the cold northern tundras, while elephants today are creatures of warmer, woodland habitats.

OK, what’s the second reason?

They are not that closely related. This paper in Nature found that the lineage of what we know today as African elephants diverged from mammoths and what became Asian elephants a whopping 7.6 million years ago, while mammoths and Asian elephants then themselves split about 6.7 million years ago. To put this in context, this division in the proboscidean order occurred roughly at the same as the human-chimpanzee split, and we can’t breed with modern chimps.

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So, case closed, there was no nookie going on?

Well, there are some caveats. Animals that are not especially closely related can and do interbreed. Hybrids of unions between bottlenose dolphins (genus Tursiops) and false killer whales (genus Pseudorca) have been recorded in captivity, and it helps that these species have the same number of chromosomes – 44. Hybridisation has also been recorded off the Outer Hebrides between wild populations of bottlenose dolphins and Risso’s dolphins (genus Grampus). 

Do mammoths and elephants have the same number of chromosomes?

In fact they do – 56 in each. This research published in 2024 reconstructed a three-dimensional mammoth genome from a skin sample, and showed how similar it is to the Asian elephant’s. The model showed how certain genes were switched on and off within the skin cells and, the story explains, how “certain genes involved with cold adaptation and hair growth were turned on in a mammoth, but not in an elephant.”

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It’s one of the reasons why the biotech company Colossal is attempting to ‘resurrect’ the woolly mammoth by editing the Asian elephant genome to insert traits that would give its offspring a mammoth-like appearance – a long shaggy coat, curved tusks and fat deposits, for example. Technically, these animals would be cold-resistant elephants rather than mammoths brought back to life. As Colossal founder George Church has previously told National Geographic, “We’re de-extincting genes not species.”

Is there a point to this research, other than the excitement of having elephants that look like woolly mammoths?

Actually, there is – scientists suggest that restoring large herbivores such as woolly mammoths (or, more accurately, animals that behave like woolly mammoths) would help areas of the Arctic return to a more steppe, grass-dominated ecosystem that would reflect more sunlight and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. But it’s a long way from bioengineering a mammoth (which is still not yet possible) to producing free-ranging herds of them that have any meaningful impacts at a landscape scale.

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Do we know if woolly mammoths could hybridise with any other species?

In fact, we do. Research by scientists from the Natural History Museum and the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden has demonstrated that woolly and Columbian mammoths repeatedly interbred in North America. In fact, the Columbian mammoth – a species that lived further south to its woolly cousin – was the result of hybridisation itself after interbreeding between woolly and steppe mammoths, but over a period of thousands of years they continued to exchange genes with their woolly cousins when they came into contact.

“Our findings contribute to a growing understanding that hybridisation has been an important factor in evolution,” said the NHM’s mammoth expert Adrian Lister. “In fact, many species have arisen this way – which isn’t the standard Darwinian idea of how evolution happens. We think of lineage changing through time, and a branching tree with species diverging, but what can happen is a cross link with two species hybridising and producing a new branch.” There is no evidence that this is what happened between elephants and mammoths, however.

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