Is the dire wolf back from extinction – or is it just a gimmick?

The only de-extinction company in the world announced today that 12,500 years after it last roamed the Earth, the dire wolf is no longer extinct.

Like a plot mashup of Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones, scientists at Colossal Biosciences claim to have pulled off the world's first de-extinction event, bringing back the dire wolf. The team's three pups include two males, Remus and Romulus, a nod to the mythological twin brothers critical to the founding of Rome, and a female called Khaleesi. The males were born on October 1, 2024, followed by the female pup roughly two months later.

"I could not be more proud of the team," said the CEO of Colossal, Ben Lamm. "This massive milestone is the first of many coming examples demonstrating that our end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works. Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies. It was once said, 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation."

So how did they do it? Essentially, by taking a modern wolf genome and making a record number of edits to more closely match the DNA of the extinct dire wolf.

The scientists at Colossal reportedly extracted DNA from two dire wolf fossils and compared the assembled genomes to that of other canid relatives. Once they identified differences, the scientists spliced together a functional genome with 20 precision edits – 15 of which were extinct gene variants not seen since the days of woolly mammoths over 12,000 years ago. The previous record for unique germline edits was eight, also held by Colossal.

They then created clones by taking the nucleus from a somatic cell and put in into an empty donor egg cell (kind of like Dolly the Sheep) before doing an embryo transfer and "managed interspecies surrogacy," having the embryos carried to term by domestic dogs, according to Time Magazine, who visited the animals.

Colossal made headlines back in March for "inventing" the woolly mouse – a proof of concept for multiplexed genome engineering to activate mammoth-like traits (like thick fur and fat storage) in mice by mimicking mammoth genomes dating back as far as 1.2 million years ago, and setting that eight-edit-record in the process.

Dire wolves aside for a moment, Colossal Biosciences wasn't content with simply bringing a long-lost species back to life. Using a less-invasive blood cloning method the company pioneered, it also cloned four critically endangered red wolves. Traditional cloning methods (if you can call "cloning" traditional) require invasive tissue biopsies, where Colossal's approach uses endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) taken from a simple blood draw.

Much like the dinosaurs in InGen's fictional park, the seven wolves all live together in a 2,000+ acre (8+ sq km) secure ecological preserve with 10-foot-tall (3-m), zoo-grade fencing at an undisclosed location. There are 10 full-time staff to care for and monitor the wolves, as well as live video feeds and drone tracking. The facility where the wolves live has been certified by the American Humane Society and registered with the USDA.

The ancient Dire wolf's territory was predominantly in North America – especially in the Midwest and Southeast – from California (The La Brea Tar Pits has been a gold mine for dire wolf fossils) to Florida. Their remains have been found as far south as Bolivia in South America, the animal preferring more temperate areas over the cold.

Colossal says it hasn't just brought back an extinct predator; it's created de-extinction. However, experts do not universally accept that claim, which seems to have annoyed geneticists in particular.

"One thing that is likely to irk geneticists is Colossal's claim that they have brought back the dire wolf," said Associate Professor Michael Knapp from the Department of Anatomy and the University of Otago, New Zealand. "Dire wolves and gray wolves differ in more than 20 positions across their genomes. Thus these new dire wolves are genetically almost certainly closer to gray wolves than to ancient dire wolves, but they look more like dire wolves than gray wolves. These are not the dire wolves that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, as the press release may suggest. Besides this simplification, and ignoring all justified ethical concerns raised, it is undeniable that the birth of these wolves is a major breakthrough in genetics."

"To truly de-extinct something, you would have to clone it," added Associate Professor Nic Rawlence, Director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory at the University of Otago, New Zealand. "So what Colossal Biosciences have produced is a gray wolf with dire wolf-like characteristics – this is not a de-extincted dire wolf, rather it is a 'hybrid.'"

Professor Philip Seddon from the University of Otago's Department of Zoology was equally scathing:

"Dire wolves are their own genus, so a very different species," he said. "What Colossal has done is to introduce a small number of changes to the genetic matter of a gray wolf to produce gray wolf pups with dire wolf features such as pale coats and potentially slightly larger size. So, hybrid gray wolves, or a GMO wolf ... Certainly, this involves advances in genetic technology, and these might have applications for the conversation of existing species – but the return of dire wolves? No."

Colossal is powering ahead, regardless. They say the dodo, woolly mammoth, and thylacine are next on the to-do list. What about a tiny triceratops? Would a genetically edited rhino with three horns do the trick?

Source: Colossal Biosciences via Businesswire