Should we be bringing back extinct species? Ethical concerns raised after dire wolf allegedly resurrected

Yahoo

11-04-2025

The recent claim that a U.S. biotechnology company resurrected the long-extinct dire wolf through genetic engineering seemed to shock the science world.
The species of canine -- about the same size as a modern gray wolf -- was native to the Americas but went extinct about 10,000 years ago.
Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, the company behind the revived dire wolf and based in Dallas, said it is "a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts" and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.
MORE: How the process of de-extinction will be used to restore this fabled species
However, bioethicists and ecologists say they are skeptical that the animals created are actually dire wolves and said there are ethical concerns including where the animals would be kept and if they could ever survive in the wild.
"All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures," Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a leader in the development of the medical ethics field, told ABC News.
"Only adult dire wolves can raise a dire wolf and there aren't any. … One thing that we know for sure, that they are not, is dire wolves."
Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief scientist, previously told ABC News her team extracted dire wolf DNA from two existing fossils to better sequence the animal's genome. A close relative of the dire wolf was used as the base.
Shapiro said the team took a gray wolf genome, which she described as genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves, and edited those cells at multiple points to contain the dire wolf DNA. The company says no animals were harmed.
Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, called the news of the resurrected dire wolf a "colossal fabrication" and referred to the species created as a "designer dog."
"This is just a big dog with a few genes inserted from a once extinct wolf," Pimm told ABC News. "Incidentally, a dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf."
He went on, "It's about as different to a regular wolf as we are from chimpanzees and if you inserted a chimpanzee gene into a human, I think that will be a horribly unethical thing to do."
Dire wolves lived in a variety of habitats including plains and mountainous areas of North America and arid areas of South America.
Fossils have been found in the asphalt pits at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles and in paleontological sites in the midwestern U.S, according to the Illinois State Museum.
Two of the dire wolves were born late last year, while the third arrived in early 2025. All three live in a secure 2,000-acre nature preserve at an undisclosed location, Colossal previously told ABC News.
MORE: What scientists learned after reconstructing DNA of extinct New Zealand bird
Experts argue keeping them in an enclosure could be seen as creating a tourist attraction and that these animals belong in the wild.
However, today's environment does not resemble the environment in which historic dire wolves lived and releasing them into the wild could harm the ecosystem.
"It has to live somewhere, and it isn't clear what the environment was that the dire wolf lived in, or what it ate, or sort of its behavior, and so you kind of face a possibility you won't know where to keep this animal that you made healthy," Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News.
He added that the behavior of dire wolves was likely shaped by the packs they roamed in or packs that they may have competed against. However, those groups also don't exist anymore.
"If you bring back something that's been dead 10,000 or 40,000 or 100,000 years, you need to bring back its environment, not just the animal," Caplan continued. "Otherwise, you potentially are going to have issues."
Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said there is no way to release the "de-extincted" dire wolves back into the wild because they wouldn't know how to survive.
Coyne told ABC News that if the revived dire wolves are let loose into the wild "without the social group that they're evolved to be in" it would be hard to expect them to "behave properly" around other animals because they've never been exposed to other species.
"So that's also unethical, because those animals are kind of separate. They're not going to have the right thing to eat, it's not going to know what to eat, how to eat, probably got the wrong digestive system. … So that's one of the ethical considerations."
Colossal Laboratories did not reply to ABC News' request for comment on these concerns.
Experts say that bringing back extinct animals will not solve any conservation problems and that efforts would be better spent trying to find ways to save current critically endangered or vulnerable species.
Worldwide, more than 41,000 species are currently threatened with extinction and more than 16,300 are considered endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.
MORE: Fish species thought to be extinct for 85 years rediscovered
Caplan said current endangered species have enough of the environment around them so we know how they live, how they behave and how to keep them alive.
"You can also use it in situations where you are worried that a valuable species -- I'm going to say bees as an example -- whose populations have been falling," he said. "Maybe you could do something to help them, because we really need our pollinators, so to speak. I don't know that we really need a dire wolf."
Pimm said another species, the red wolf, which lives in the coastal areas of North Carolina, is also on the verge of extinction and more efforts could be focused on saving the animal, and showing it is not a threat.
"The difficulty that we have with the red wolf is that when its numbers increase, people are challenged, they don't want there to be too many red wolves," he said. "So, the challenge for us in our country is to find find more room for nature, and that's not always a politically easy thing to do."
Should we be bringing back extinct species? Ethical concerns raised after dire wolf allegedly resurrected originally appeared on abcnews.go.com