The woolly mammoth can never be brought back from extinction.
The woolly mammoth can't be revived
Scientists are attempting to bring the creature back from the dead with the aid of genetic engineering but science writer Tom Lathan believes this should be ignored as the animals they are trying to revive are just "cold-resistant elephants".
He said: "They are using gene-editing techniques to resurrect traits of the mammoth and splice them into the DNA of Asian elephants.
"That's something different - that's not a mammoth.
"In the marketing they describe it as the de-extinction of the mammoth, but actually they're creating a kind of hybrid animal."
It comes after scientists took a big step towards reviving the extinct animal earlier this year by successfully reconstructing the chromosomes of a 52,000-year-old creature that was excavated in Siberia in 2018 after being freeze-dried by the weather shortly after it died.
This could aid efforts to 'de-extinct' the woolly mammoth as it allows a DNA comparison between the beast and modern elephants.
Professor Thomas Gilbert, co-author of the research at the University of Copenhagen, said: "These results have obvious consequences for contemporary efforts aimed at woolly mammoth de-extinction."