Joe Rogan's Strong Reaction as Animal Returns After Being Extinct for 10,000 Years

Yahoo

08-04-2025

For the first time in 10,000 years the dire wolf - yes, the one made popular Game of Thrones - is alive.
Well, three of them are, actually. A company called Colossal Biosciences rewrote the genetic code of a gray wolf while using domestic dogs as surrogates to bring three dire wolves to life, Romulus and Remus, both six months old, and their younger sister Khaleesi, two months old.
Podcast host and UFC analyst Joe Rogan welcomed Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm onto his podcast with a strong reaction to the news. "This one is F***ING WILD. Literally. Ben Lamm and his team are Colossal Biosciences have brought back the Dire Wolf," Rogan wrote on social media.
Lamm was asked what he learned from bringing the animal out of extinction.
"They have this super thick fur, their tail is a little longer, they are taller. They're 80 pounds right now, and a typical wolf is somewhere between 75 and 100 pounds, for a male, and that's kind of on the high side. These will probably be 140 pounds, which is what we think. They are also significantly more muscular," he told CBR.
"Obviously, they're Arctic white as well. You'll see one of the things that we didn't know is that we found in the genome that they are white. We did a lot of computational analysis and had a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 73,000-year-old skull. So we had about 50,000 years of genetic divergence, so you could find things like coat colors and differences in their coat, which we engineered in. We didn't know what those differences were going to look like, but when you see them, they almost have this mane to them."
Colossal, which was founded in 2021, has a de-extinction "wish list" containing the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Earlier this year the company announced it copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, "a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth," according to Time magazine.