Bringing Back Dire Wolves?

A biotech start-up company called Colossal Biosciences has done something big by birthing the first genetically engineered pups that closely resemble the extinct Dire Wolf. Wow! The 3 pups are names Romulus and Remus (born in October 2024) and Khaleesi (born in January 2025). They’ve made a lot of effort in trying to bring back and animal that went extinct over 12,000 years ago.

How they got it right was by extracting DNA from ancient Dire Wolf fossils, namely a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull, then identifying the 14 genes responsible for the distinctive Dire Wolf Traits like its big size, white fur and robust build. They ended up editing Grey Wolf genes with these ones, implanted them in dog cells and had domestic dog surrogates. A proper In-Vitro type situation, if you ask me…

Now, as much as this is a major accomplishment, I will give it to them, I just don’t think this counts as de-extinction, and I’m not the only one. Experts argue that the pups that were born are simply modified Grey Wolves and not pure Dire Wolves, partially because of the major genetic differences between the two species. Dr. Nic Rawlence, a paleogeneticist, said that ancient Dire Wolf DNA is too fragmented for accurate cloning, and that dire wolves diverged from gray wolves between 2.5 and 6 million years ago. And I understand that 100%. I feel like if something isn’t cloned exactly, you can’t call it de-extinction because its not the same set of DNA, you’ve gone and create a whole new species, technically.

And then after all this, i also saw that the same company was working on the de-extinction of the Mammoth, Dodo bird and Tasmanian Tiger. Maybe we leave sleeping dogs to lie, instead of being caught up in Jurassic World/Park type situation. I feel like (where humans aren’t involved) there’s a reason these animals went extinct in the first place. So why mess with life cycles that way.

What do you think?