""A giant meatball made from flesh cultivated using the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth has been unveiled at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.
The meatball was created by Australian cultured meat company Vow which - promising this was not an April Fools' joke - said it wanted to get people talking about cultured meat, calling it a more sustainable alternative for real meat.
"We wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now," Vow founder Tim Noakesmith told Reuters, adding that an additional reason for choosing mammoth is that scientists believe that the animal's extinction was caused by climate change.
The meatball was made of sheep cells inserted with a singular mammoth gene called myoglobin.
Chief Scientific Officer at Vow James Ryall said: "We inserted the gene from the mammoth into these sheep cells and then over-expressed that gene really, really highly.
"So all that means is that we could detect the amount of traditional sheep myoglobin inside the cells and we could detect over 100 times more mammoth myoglobin in those cells themselves, so quite a significant portion of what you can see here in front of you today comes from mammoth."
Since the mammoth's DNA sequence obtained by Vow had a few gaps, African elephant DNA was inserted to complete it.
The meatball, which has the aroma of crocodile meat, is currently not for consumption.
"Its protein is literally 4,000 years old. We haven't seen it in a very long time. That means we want to put it through rigorous tests, something that we would do with any product we bring to the market," Mr Noakesmith said.
Vow hopes to put cultured meat on the map in the European Union, a market where such meat as food is not regulated yet.
