The Return of the Dire Wolf

[jAcos]

"The Return of the Dire Wolf" - Time Magazine story


This all over the world now. About resurrection of "Dire Wolf". This from Time Magazine - Time story and Collosal Biosciences.

From Time Magazine's - Time story - "The Return of the Dire Wolf" - story by Jeffrey Kluger  / photographs by Robert Clark - Apr 7, 2025.

 

-Article EXCERPTS-
 

Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there's something very un-puppy like about the snowy white 6-month olds their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there's their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn't domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they're dire wolves which means they have cause to be lonely.

The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences.

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.
 

The dire wolf isn't the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.

"We are an evolutionary force at this point, says Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. We are deciding what the future of these species will be. The Center for Biological Diversity suggests that 30% of the planet's genetic diversity will be lost by 2050, and Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm insist that genetic engineering is a vital tool to reverse this. Company executives often frame the technology not just as a moral good, but a moral imperative a way for humans, who have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, to get square with nature. If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people, Shapiro says, we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we've done to the world already."
 

The woolly mouse, to a minor extent, and the dire wolves, to a scientifically seismic one, are first steps in that direction. But not everyone agrees. Scientific history is rife with examples of newly introduced species becoming invasive species the doctrine of unintended consequences biting humans when we played too cute with other animals. An exotic pet escapes and multiplies, decimating native species. A toad brought in to kill off beetles ends up killing off the marsupials that eat the toads. And genetic engineering is still a nascent field. Nearly 30 years after Dolly the sheep was cloned, the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems. What's more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo.

"There's a risk of death. There's a risk of side effects that are severe, says Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master's program at Columbia University. There's a lot of suffering involved in that. There are going to be miscarriages."

 

Source - Time Magazine

The Science Behind the Return of the Dire Wolf

Colossal Biosciences