Scientists say they ‘brought back' dire wolves from extinction. Not exactly.

Washington Post

08-04-2025

For over 2 million years, dire wolves roamed present day North America until their extinction around 10,000 B.C.
On Monday, a Dallas-based bioscience firm said it had brought the species back to life in the form of three pups, claiming to have 'successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction' in a remarkable statement on its website.
The team at Colossal said the pups — named Khaleesi, Romulus and Remus, and ranging in age from 3 to 6 months old — were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago.
Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal's technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves — and that the process has raised a raft of ethical issues.
'The reality is we can't de-extinct extinct creatures because we can't use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,' said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand's University of Otago.
In a phone interview Tuesday, he said Colossal's pups are not dire wolves, but gray wolves that have had part of their genome changed to look like dire wolves. 'What Colossal is trying to do is genetically engineering animals to look like extinct creatures,' he said. 'They look cute and cuddly but … they're not a dire wolf.'
Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain's Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky that he was 'not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.'
Video posted on Colossal's social media showed two of the white fluffy pups, Romulus and Remus, practicing their howls. Romulus and Remus are the names of the mythical founders of Rome, who were raised by a wolf. Dire wolves will also be familiar to fans of 'Game of Thrones,' the hit television show, which features several of the animals. The name of the other pup, Khaleesi, appears in the 'Game of Thrones' TV and book series, which also depicts dire wolves.
The 'dire wolf' pups are the latest headline-grabbing claim from the bioscience venture founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, which says it is working to bring back some of the world's most famous extinct species.
In its sights are the woolly mammoth, the dodo and thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, which it aims to reengineer for the modern world. It has already created mice with hair like a woolly mammoth, and aims to conserve ancient traits as part of what it says are broader efforts to preserve the world's biodiversity. The company has been valued at $10.2 billion and raised $435 million in funding, including $200 million announced in January.
Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, said in a statement on the company's website that the birth of the pups shows 'we are one step closer to a world in which these tools are among those at our disposal to help species thrive in their rapidly changing habitats.'
Shapiro, previously told The Washington Post that the company was not trying to clone animals in the same way that had been done with Dolly the Sheep. 'We're not trying to make something that's identical to a dodo,' Shapiro said about the company's efforts to create a dodo-like bird using the DNA of a pigeon. 'We're trying to create something that's able to behave like a dodo would on that landscape in some key, functional way. So a large, flightless bird that wanders around and eats fruits and spreads the seeds,' she said.
Some scientists are dismissive of the claims and wary of the company's approach, even while expressing admiration for the technological accomplishments of its CRISPR gene editing techniques — in which a piece of DNA can be snipped out from a genome and precisely replaced.
In the wolves' case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. 'There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,' he said. 'Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we've got left,' he said. This could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases.
He said trying to re-create the characteristics of extinct animals provides no incentive to conserve species in the first place and raises concerns about where and how the animals will live. 'Is there even going to be the habitat? How are you going to deal with increased human-wolf conflict? What's going to happen when your genetically engineered gray wolves hybridize with other gray wolves?' he said.
He also raised concerns about how a species could survive with just three members and said 'at least 500 individuals' would be needed to ensure a genetically diverse population. He also raised ethical concerns: Will extinction companies trademark these creatures? Who owns them? These are all discussions we need to have,' he said.
Colossal did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.
Michael Knapp, an associate professor at the University of Otago's department of anatomy, agreed the topic raises a raft of ethical questions but said the birth of the pups is a 'major breakthrough in genetics.'
'It is easy to brush attempts to bring back extinct species off as vanity projects without purpose in the real world, but that would ignore the technological breakthroughs behind these efforts,' he said in a statement. 'Whether or not this is an avenue that should be further pursued is a highly complex question.'