Meatball Made with Woolly Mammoth DNA Created by Food Startup

The process of making lab-grown meat is "much like they do in the movie Jurassic Park" according to the Australian company Vow

You might be seeing 5,000-year-old meat on a menu soon.

An Australian food startup used woolly mammoth DNA to create a lab-grown mammoth meatball.

On Tuesday, Vow, a company focused on creating lab-grown meats, presented an extra-large meatball made with genes from the extinct mammal to a science museum in Amsterdam.

This meatball is not designed for consumption but will be at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave to draw attention to the potential of cultured meats.

Vow creates cultured meats — also called cultivated or cell-based meats — by combining cells and micronutrients to form muscle, fat and connective tissue, according to their site.

Vow's chief scientific officer James Ryall described the lab work to Reuters as, "much like they do in the movie Jurassic Park."

Mike Corder/AP/Shutterstock

For this particular project, the meatball was made of sheep cells inserted with a mammoth gene called myoglobin. Vow found publicly available genetic information from the mammoth, which was obtained from remains regularly found in the Arctic permafrost, and filled in any missing genetic data from the mammoth's closest living relative, the African elephant.

Vow's "conversation starter" aims to teach people about the benefits of lab-grown meat such as possibilities for it being more nutritious, sustainable and affordable, says the team.

"We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before," Vox founder Tim Noakesmith told the Associated Press. "That there are things that are unique and better than the meats that we're necessarily eating now, and we thought the mammoth would be a conversation starter and get people excited about this new future."

While this meatball is not designed to be eaten, lab-grown meat is not a foreign concept. In November, the US Food and Drug Administration said it is safe to consume cultured chicken.