On April 30, 2026, Colossal Biosciences announced the bluebuck (*Hippotragus leucophaeus*) as the sixth species in its de-extinction portfolio, joining woolly mammoth, dire wolf, thylacine, dodo, and moa. The company says the bluebuck project has been underway since 2024 and is its first antelope and first African megafauna target; the species was hunted to extinction in South Africa around 1800, and one report describes the team as using a historical specimen to generate a 40-fold coverage nuclear genome.
Technically, the project signals progress in cross-species genome reconstruction, stem-cell manipulation, and surrogate reproduction for bovids, a family of more than 140 species including cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, bison, and antelopes. Colossal says it is introducing bluebuck-specific variants into roan antelope cells, its closest living relative, and expects the first birth could be around 2028 if the editing and gestation pipeline succeeds; that is a direct test of whether complex mammal resurrection can be made repeatable rather than one-off.
For the Ark, the priority is to monitor whether this work produces transferable methods for genome rescue, reproductive cloning, and assisted rewilding of threatened species, especially antelopes and other grazing mammals that support ecosystem stability. The team should track whether Colossal publishes durable protocols, surrogate success rates, and tissue-preservation methods, then assess which of those methods can be incorporated into lunar biobanks, redundancy archives, and off-world conservation stacks before more lineages are lost.