‘De-extinction' isn't real, but the conservation questions it raises are
This story was originally published by High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
What was the dire wolf? Like many species lost before living memory and known only from remains, the 1854 discovery of a jawbone from this extinct North American predator was more suggestion than revelation. 'Certain naturalists may regard the fossil as an indication of a variety only of the Canis lupus,' or gray wolf, wrote paleontologist Joseph Leidy, describing what he tentatively called Canis primaevus. ' (Of) the correctness of such a view,' he added, 'I shall not attempt to decide.'
In early April, 169 years after Leidy's cautious account, the venture-capital-funded startup Colossal Biosciences showed no such hesitation in announcing the species' purported resurrection in its laboratory. 'For the first time in human history, (we have) successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction,' its website boasted. The company had used gene-editing technology to create three wolf pups that, according to its scientists, recreate some of the physical characteristics of the long-gone species.
After an initial flurry of favorable press, the skeptics weighed in. Biologists argued that a handful of genetic changes to a cloned gray wolf — a species from which the dire wolf diverged 5 million years ago — did not add up to 'de-exinction.' 'The three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves. Nor are they proxies of the dire wolf,' the members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Canid Specialist Group concluded. Even if the company had recreated something much closer to the species, said critics, the production of a handful of individuals destined for life in captivity would be far from an ecologically meaningful accomplishment. Can an animal whose prey, habitat and climate no longer exist ever really flourish again?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who, as South Dakota governor, oversaw a $3 million grant to Colossal — praised the company, however, and used its dubious success to attack the Endangered Species Act. 'Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation — not regulation — that has spawned American greatness,' Burgum posted on X. '(De-extinction) can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.'
Burgum's interest comes at a perilous time for the Endangered Species Act, which is currently in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration. A January executive order sought to resurrect the 'God Squad,' a committee empowered to overrule the law when species protections prevent development. More recently, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed redefining the law's definition of 'harm' to species so that it no longer includes habitat loss. The impact on vulnerable species and ecosystems remains uncertain. What is clearer is that gene editing and Colossal's so-called de-extinction technology pose new ethical and philosophical challenges to one of our bedrock environmental laws.
What we call 'species' are an attempt to fit the complex, untidy reality of nature into convenient categories, and biologists frequently use new data (or new interpretations of existing data) to redefine where one species ends and another begins. Recognizing this, the Endangered Species Act was originally written to apply to 'any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature,' intentionally vague language meant to allow agency scientists and managers to adapt to evolving science.
Species definitions become even more complicated when individuals from two such 'distinct population segments' interbreed and produce hybrids. Hybrids are natural phenomena, but if their interbreeding continues unchecked, they can become threats to the integrity of their parent species. Unsurprisingly, Fish and Wildlife has struggled to clarify if and how the Endangered Species Act applies to hybrids, and its policies remain ambiguous.
In a future where gene editing is increasingly prominent in biodiversity conservation — and companies like Colossal might create chimeric organisms with traits of endangered species but no direct connection with their inspiration — the risks of such ambiguity are growing. Would the release of a tankful of desert pupfish lookalikes meet the recovery goals for the species, one of the world's most endangered fish? Would the propagation of transgenic, disease-resistant whitebark pines counteract the loss of their original lineage to the blister rust that now plagues the species? For now, the Endangered Species Act and the policies that shape its interpretation have little to say on the subject.
These questions are difficult because they are as much philosophical as biological and legal. There is something instructive in Joseph Leidy's uncertainty: The messiness of biological diversity can be readily exploited by bad-faith actors like Burgum, but the processes responsible for it cannot be so easily faked. Species, however they are defined, are the dynamic products of biological evolution, rooted in landscapes and ecological communities. In a future where agencies can once again work to strengthen rather than weaken the Endangered Species Act, policies on hybrid and transgenic organisms should prioritize this fundamental generative force — not by the outright rejection of genetic modification as a conservation tool but by recognizing the central importance of unbroken chains of ancestry and kinship, produced over centuries and millennia by self-willed organisms. By this standard, Colossal's dire wolf project is a failure.
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