10-04-2025
A company tried to bring back the dire wolf. Is it the start of 'Jurassic Park'?
A company tried to bring back the dire wolf. Is it the start of 'Jurassic Park'?
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Dire wolf brought back after extinction raises ethical questions
Questions about animal welfare and allocation of resources rise after a company revives the dire wolf.
'We see no possible way this could go wrong,' wrote the Jurassic World account on X, in tongue-in-cheek response to the news.
Most experts USA TODAY spoke with agreed that attempts to de-extinct animals, like the dire wolf, result in animals that are not the same as their ancestors and are actually hybrid animals.
Ethicists and conservationists appear to be divided on attempts to bring back extinct species – and whether the efforts matter.
A company owned by a wealthy businessman re-creates an extinct apex predator and lets it roam on a private ecological preserve.
That's no longer just the plot of a 1990s science fiction movie.
Colossal Biosciences announcement that it had used the DNA of an extinct ice age-era dire wolf to breed new, live wolves has sparked excitement, and some fear. There's certainly eerie similarities to 'Jurassic Park' – the movie where dinosaurs came back to life.
'We see no possible way this could go wrong,' wrote the social media account for the spin-off movie franchise Jurassic World, in tongue-in-cheek response to the news.
Despite parallels between the movie and Colossal's work, scientists and ethicists say a world where prehistoric animals are roaming city streets and gobbling up humans isn't likely to become a reality anytime soon.
'People say, remember Jurassic Park? And I say, remember Jurassic Park was fiction,' said Hank Greely, a Stanford University law professor who specializes in the ethical quandaries of biotechnologies. 'Fiction needs to be dramatic. ... Utopias are not dramatic.'
But some conservationists are expressing wide-ranging concern about the unintended consequences that could arise as researchers continue to try to resurrect versions of extinct animals.
'Everybody's excited about the technology, and rightly so – it's just amazing what they've done,' said Dave Strayer, a senior scientist emeritus at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in New York. 'But unless they're only talking about raising these animals to be kept in a zoo or private collections, they're going to be releasing them into the wild – and what happens then?'
What's the purpose?
Most experts USA TODAY spoke with agreed that attempts to de-extinct animals, like the dire wolf, result in animals that are not the same as their ancestors and are actually hybrid animals. Scientists create these animals by engineering DNA that matches important traits of the extinct animal into a modern animal's DNA sequence.
Colossal's dire wolves are, in essence, gray wolves with about 20 handpicked genes from dire wolf DNA that re-create key characteristics of the species.
'They're a genetically engineered life form that hasn't existed before that has some attributes of dire wolves,' Strayer said.
But ethicists and conservationists appear to be divided on attempts to bring back extinct species – and whether the efforts matter.
Colossal has no plans to release its dire wolves into the wild, said Beth Shapiro, the company's chief science officer. They live in an undisclosed location on a 2,000 acre protected ecological preserve where they are restricted from leaving and are monitored, she said. Researchers intend to watch how these animals interact with their ecosystem to derive insights for future projects, Shapiro said.
But Colossal is working on long-term projects to create genetically engineered versions of the woolly mammoth, dodo bird and Tasmanian tiger with the intention to help repopulate some of those species in the wild.
Some conservationists believe certain species should eventually be placed in their natural habitats to help restore the ecosystems, while others have expressed unease about reintegrating them into the wild, saying the "cool" factor alone is enough reason to de-extinct animals.
"We do a lot of things because they're cool. Coolness is underrated as a reason to do things in academic discussions," Greely said. "It would be really cool to see a woolly mammoth, and it would be really cool to see a giant ground sloth, and that's worth something."
Impact on ecosystems
Ben Novak, the lead scientist at Revive and Restore, a biotech nonprofit in the de-extinction space, argued that the extinction of certain species can hurt other animals in an ecosystem through domino effects related to their food chains and habitats.
A 2018 World Wildlife Foundation report found that humans have eradicated 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970.
By thoughtfully reintroducing specific extinct or threatened species back into their ecosystem, the same way conservationists transplant living species, Novak said he believes they can help protect other animals in those areas. The nonprofit is working on reviving populations of the black-footed ferret and passenger pigeon, among other animals.
But because these genetically constructed animals aren't identical to their ancestors, some worry that they won't necessarily behave as their ancestors would when placed in their ancestral environment.
Strayer said that introducing a species that has been long gone could be the equivalent of an invasive species, acting in ways difficult or impossible to predict.
Also, humans have gotten used to these animals being gone – and aren't always happy when they come back.
In the West, the reintroduction of gray wolves into areas they lived in just 100 years ago has generated enormous controversy. Ranchers complain about predation on their herds and city dwellers fear having wolves living too close for comfort.
'We have centuries of history of deciding a species has a desirable attribute, deciding we know what will happen when we introduce it into a new place and then discovering we were wrong,' Strayer said.
'What will we do if they don't behave as we hope?' he said. 'Who decides if they even should be released into the wild? What kind of plan is in place to deal with unintended consequences? And who pays for it?'
Animal welfare concerns
Experts also raised concern about the treatment of de-extinct animals and those used to help create them.
Efforts to re-create extinct animals require extensive testing – and potentially failed attempts. Animals that birth de-extinct species could experience miscarriage, stillbirth, early death and possible pain, suggested Jay Odenbaugh, a professor of philosophy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
'It is morally wrong to cause a sentient being unnecessary suffering,' Odenbaugh wrote in a 2023 article published in the Cambridge University Press.
That doesn't appear to have been the case with the dire wolf constructs, said Shapiro, who told USA TODAY that none of the animals used in Colossal's dire wolf program suffered undue pain. Several of the pregnancies were resorbed early on and some of the pregnancies did not establish after the embryo transfer, she said. After the births, all of the surrogate dog mothers were given to the American Humane Society who adopted them to human families.
Odenbaugh also noted the obligation to conserve and restore biodiversity can be outweighed by concern about animal welfare in some circumstances, but it requires active debate and consideration. However, he questioned the moral purpose of de-extincting animals if they aren't integrated into ecosystems.
'There's a sense in which we're creating animals only to frustrate them,' he told USA TODAY.
The moral dilemma around conservation
De-extinction projects raise a moral quandary for many conservationists who fear that the technology could make people less concerned about humanity's impact on species they are driving to the brink.
Ronald Sandler said he's excited about what Colossal's dire wolf project means for science. But the risk, he said, is that it could create a distraction that dissuades people addressing the root causes of why species go extinct in the first place, such as habitat degradation, pollution, overfishing and climate change.
He views de-extinction as a new tool conservationists might be able to use to help ecosystems – not the end-all-be-all of the profession.
Greely agreed.
"It's hard to save endangered species, but it's going to be a lot harder to de-extinct them," he said.
