The remains of woolly mammoths with their fur and tissues intact are regularly found buried in Arctic permafrost. Their discovery allowed scientists to sequence the genome of the mammoth and learn interesting details about the life of these extinct giants that revived the Ice Age. Now some of this information is being used to grow, roughly, mammoth meat in the laboratory, he reports CNN.

Vow, an Australian startup that produces meat in the lab, has made what it describes as a mammoth patty.

However, the meatballs are not intended for human consumption, but rather, according to the company, a way to draw attention to the potential of cultured meat to change people’s eating habits to make them more planet-friendly.

On Tuesday, meatballs will add to the collection of the science museum Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in the Netherlands.

“We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is that many more people around the world will start hearing about cultured meat,” said James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientist.

A meatball with a tiny bit of mammoth DNA

Even calling the product mammoth meat is a stretch. It would be more correct to say that this cultured meat is laboratory-produced lamb with a small amount of mammoth DNA.

Scientists working on the project did not have access to frozen mammoth tissue on which to base their efforts.

Instead, they focused on a mammalian protein called myoglobin (a protein found in muscle fibers) that gives meat its texture, color and flavor, by identifying the mammoth DNA sequence in a publicly available genomic database.

They filled in the gaps in the mammoth myoglobin DNA sequence using information from the African elephant genome. The scientists inserted the synthesized gene into a muscle cell of a sheep, which was then grown in the laboratory.