Frontier signal stream

Colossal announced a programme to revive the bluebuck, a slate-blue South African antelope hunted to extinction around 1800, making it the company's sixth active de-extinction project alongside the woolly mammoth, dire wolf, thylacine, dodo and moa. It is the first African large mammal Colossal has taken on, and the company paired it with a stated effort to support living African antelope populations, of which it says 29 of 90 species are threatened.

Revive & Restore published a project update on Ape Atlas, a forensic genomics platform for great ape conservation supported by its Catalyst Science Fund and led by Dr Tomas Marques-Bonet at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The platform is designed to answer a question that normally goes unanswered when gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos are seized from trafficking networks — where the animals came from — so that authorities can identify poaching hotspots, prosecute traffickers and return animals to their home regions. The system pairs a portable Nanopore sequencing device with a streamlined protocol built for field use by personnel with minimal genomics training, supported by step-by-step instructional films and training materials for sanctuary veterinarians and wildlife officials. To build the reference database the team has established formal partnerships with wildlife sanctuaries in Sierra Leone, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Cameroon, geolocating more than 500 great ape samples to date. The full workflow was tested at Fundació MONA, a primate rescue and rehabilitation centre in Girona, Spain, under mock real-world conditions. The team has also launched a centralised web platform aggregating data across partner sites in a map-based format for non-specialist users. Field testing with African sanctuary partners is set to begin in earnest during 2026. Revive & Restore characterises the platform as Africa's first continent-wide forensic genomics platform for great apes.