On Tuesday 28 March 2023 the Australian cultivated meat startup Vow, run by chief executive George Peppou and cofounded by Tim Noakesmith, revealed a giant mammoth meatball at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. The idea came from Bas Korsten of the creative agency Wunderman Thompson. Working with Professor Ernst Wolvetang of the University of Queensland, the team took the publicly available DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, the muscle protein behind much of the colour, aroma and taste of meat. They filled its gaps with African elephant DNA and placed it in sheep myoblast cells, which were grown to about 20 billion cells. The ball was slow baked and then finished on the outside with a blowtorch, and Noakesmith said people present thought it smelled like an earlier crocodile prototype. Nobody tasted it, because Wolvetang said no one knows how the immune system would react to a protein unseen for thousands of years. Vow had first wanted to make dodo meat, but the needed DNA sequences do not exist, so the meatball went on display at the museum instead. Music composed by Bert Cole (bitbybitsound.com)