Mammoth task: billionaire Peter Thiel funded effort to resurrect woolly beast

The Silicon Valley titan, who has openly challenged death as an inevitability, invested $100,000 in a project to bring the extinct mammoth back to life

PayPal billionaire and Gawker war-wager Peter Thiel has invested $100,000 in a research effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth.

Thiel, who believes that viewing death as inevitable is a sign of "complacency of the western world", gave the money to Harvard University genomics professor George Church, whose laboratory is attempting to revive the extinct pachyderm.