Elephant in the dining room; startup makes mammoth meatball

An Australian company on Tuesday lifted the glass cloche on the 'Mammoth Meatball' - a "real deal" meatball made of lab-grown cultured meat using the genetic sequence from the long-extinct mastodon. Cultivated meat also called cultured or cell-based meat is made from animal cells.

Livestock doesn’t need to be killed to produce it, which advocates say is better not just for the animals but also for the environment.The launch in an Amsterdam science museum came just days before April 1 so there was an elephant in the room.Tim Noakesmith, Founder of Australian startup Vow said "This is the real deal, yeah, this is not an April fool's joke, this is a real innovation and something that we have actually done and no one is going to turn around and say that this was fake or a joke."

Vow used publicly available genetic information from the woolly mammoth, filled missing parts with genetic data from its closest living relative, the African elephant, and inserted it into a sheep cell. Experts say that if the technology is widely adopted, it could vastly reduce the environmental impact of global meat production in the future.