An Australian food company has created a meatball from the flesh of the long extinct woolly mammoth.

Scientist from Vow (Food) cooked up the ice-age dish and have investigated the lab-grown potential of 50 exotic species from alpaca to peacock in a bid to invent the perfect protein.

The company is seeking to change the way the world thinks about lab-grown meat, hoping to convert millions worldwide to “eating things that can be produced in electrified systems,” according to a recent article in the Guardian.

Prof Ernst Wolvetang at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland said the process was “ridiculously easy and fast and that it was completed “in a couple of weeks”.

He said they, “took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving the meat its flavour, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA.”

Explaining why no one had stepped up to sample to primeval delicacy he said:

“We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years. So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies”.

Originally the company had to planned on creating a meatball out of Dodo Bird meat but pivoted as “the DNA sequences needed do not exist” to create it.

Would you step up and taste the meatball?