A venture capital firm funded by the CIA has officially placed its bets on bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, according to a public portfolio released this month and spotted by The Intercept.

In-Q-Tel is over 20 years old, but only now have its taxpayer dollars been directed towards the genetically-engineered resurrection of extinct animals, or de-extinction.

Colossal made headlines last year when it announced its intention to bring back the woolly mammoth, the appreciably hairier cousin of the elephant, which went extinct about 4,000 years ago.

Critics of de-extinction raise several problems: they argue that the original habitats of most extinct animals no longer exist and that funding put towards de-extinction would be better invested in protecting species that are still around.

They’d be proxy species: animals that look and might act like the ones that are gone.

Even if de-extinction goes over flawlessly—which is to say, without harming either the animals used to produce the proxy animals or the proxy animals themselves—behavioral characteristics can’t be extrapolated from genes.

In other words, the animals won’t have a pre-existing population to teach them how to act like a mammoth or a thylacine.