(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A banner is raised with the new name for Salt Lake City's NHL team, Utah Mammoth, in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
Ryan Smith stood at center ice at the Delta Center with a microphone in his hand.
The Utah Mammoth owner addressed the sold-out crowd following his NHL team’s final home game in its inaugural season on April 10.
There was a tinge of sadness trickling through the arena. But, more than that, there was a palpable excitement for what was to come after a historic 12 months.
“In the only way that Utah does it, we knew that you would all show up. [The team] did their part, you did your part,” Smith said. “This was a test year — it is about to get fun.”
And he was right.
Less than a month later, Smith Entertainment Group announced the official rebrand from Utah Hockey Club to Utah Mammoth, along with new logos, player jerseys and merchandise.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Smith Entertainment Group co-founders Ryan and Ashley Smith at the announcement of the new name for Salt Lake City's NHL team, Utah Mammoth, in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
Smith joined ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show on May 8 to discuss the Mammoth brand. McAfee and his crew had some quick suggestions.
“You need this. Intimidation factor through the roof. You need four mammoths outside the front — four because “U-T-A-H,” obviously,” Connor Campbell said. “Four mammoths kind of out front the arena so that when all the fans are walking in, they’re walking past the mammoth.”
Anthony DiGuilo, another personality on the program, mentioned they “stole the idea” from the new stadium that the Buffalo Bills are building, set to be open in 2026. There are three bison sculptures out front, he said, which stand between 12 and 15 feet. DiGuilo’s request for Smith, though, was that the potential mammoth statue be “at least 25 or 35 feet.”


TUSKS UP @RyanQualtrics #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/94wPGjnACY
Smith seemed open to the idea, saying, “The good news is we’ve got one mammoth setup that we’re going to put out there,” and followed up his show appearance with a post on X.
“Productive ideation session…Just got off with Bigstatues.com to kick the tires,” Smith wrote.
Big Statues is a Utah-run business spearheaded by Matt Glenn, who has been creating bronze monuments for more than 15 years. His company has created high-profile sculptures for the NFL, PGA and Little League World Series. They’re hoping the NHL is next.
“We’ve been in talks with Ryan,” Glenn said. “I think it would be fantastic. The effect on the fans would be magical to watch them come in and be in the shadows of the Delta Center, and then the shadows of a 20- or 30-foot mammoth. Especially for the kids, walking up and seeing this enormous mascot out front of the hockey arena, and then going in and seeing a fantastic game on ice — it would be monumental. I would love to be a part of it.”
Given the desired size for the mammoth statue, Glenn said it would be about a year-long process to complete and transfer to the Delta Center plaza.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Hockey Club celebrates their goal in the final minutes of the game, in NHL action between the Utah Hockey Club and the San Jose Sharks, at the Delta Center, on Friday, Jan 10, 2025.
Glenn and his team start with a design that they clear with the client — hypothetically, in this case, SEG — and then go into construction mode. A smaller model is built and then scaled up upon approval in big foam pieces. The clay work is then done, and the structure gets coated in silicone and backed with a plaster mother mold; the casting of the statue is made from those molds. Finally, all the pieces are welded back together, and patina (the coloration) is applied.
“It’s definitely feasible. We’ve done huge statues all over the country. We’re working on two 17-foot statues of Bigfoot right now. It’s going back to Michigan,” Glenn said. “As far as the mammoth statue goes, we can certainly do that in whatever size they want it to be.”
The mammoth monument could be one trademark of Utah hockey for years to come. Colossal Biosciences, though, is trying to bring the animal back from extinction. Colossal, the Dallas-based company, does genetic engineering to de-extinct several animals.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Columbian mammoth at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City on Monday, Dec. 6, 2021.
Mammoths truly could roam again alongside the NHL franchise. Not just in statue form.
“As soon as people learn that we can’t get DNA from dinosaurs and therefore Jurassic Park is not going to be real, the next thing they ask for is a mammoth,” said Beth Shapiro, who is the chief science officer at Colossal. “We’ve launched three species — mammoths, dodos and thylacines — but people love the mammoth as you can tell. No one is calling their hockey team the dodos.”
The process of bringing back a version of the woolly mammoth is even more complicated than Utah scoring 6-on-5 at the end of a game.
Shapiro and the fellow scientists at Colossal have mammoth DNA from cold places like Alaska and Siberia because there are better preservation conditions up there. As soon as an animal dies, the DNA in its cells starts to break up into smaller pieces until, eventually, there is nothing to recover. That process slows in colder climates.
(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) The Huntington Mammoth skeleton in the muck at the construction site, August 1988.
Colossal collects pieces of those mammoth bones that are thawing out of the frozen sediment there and returns a “little chunk” of that DNA to the lab. Shapiro said everything that is not DNA is dissolved, and it leaves DNA sequences in a little tube of liquid. They then sequence that, the “traditional” way, Shapiro described.
A Mammoth genome is four billion letters long, and, from one mammoth bone, Shapiro can extract trillions of little fragments and build a genome sequence for them. The key, though, is finding the similarities between each respective mammoth’s DNA.
“What we’re trying to figure out is what parts of that four-billion-letter genome sequence make a mammoth a mammoth? We have to compare them to each other and ask where they’re all the same,” Shapiro said. “We look for places where all the mammoths that we have are the same as each other and different from the Asian Elephant, which is the closest living relative of a mammoth.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Hockey Club celebrates their victory over the Calgary Flames during the game at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.
The company aims to have mammoth-like elephant embryos by next year and its first calf by 2028.
“We can’t make all of the changes in an Asian Elephant cell that would make a mammoth. Once a species is extinct, it is extinct,” Shapiro said. “But what we’re trying to do with de-extinction is bring back some aspects of those species. Really, we’ll be creating a mammoth, but a mammoth for the future. It will be an Asian Elephant that has traits of a mammoth.”
The traits that Colossal is focusing on would allow the modern mammoth to survive in the cold — so thicker layers of hair and thicker layers of fat underneath the skin to keep it warm. Shapiro and her group were able to achieve that in their creation of the “woolly mice” last year.


Scientists have bred woolly mice on their journey to bring back the mammoth. https://t.co/95Xlx37Qz8 pic.twitter.com/KcG7ChMIGD
Is there any concern with launching a new type of mammoth in the modern ecosystem?
“This is one of the reasons for that phased approach,” Shapiro said. “With mammoths, I’m not as concerned as I might be for something that replicates more quickly or that has a really rapid generation time. This is a 22-month pregnancy, and then 14 years before they can reproduce. This isn’t something that is going to get out of hand.”
While Shapiro and Colossal work through the next phases of this project, there will be 23 hockey-player Mammoths on the ice at Delta Center come the 2025-26 opening night in October.
For now, those will be the only mammoths to populate Utah — plus, maybe, a bronze replica to look over downtown Salt Lake City.
“It is a great name for a Utah team,” Glenn said. “It is very fitting.”
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