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No, the Dire Wolf Has Not Been Brought Back From Extinction (newscientist.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Colossal Biosciences has claimed it "successfully restored" the extinct dire wolf after a "10,000+ year absence," but scientists clarify these are actually genetically modified grey wolves. The U.S. company announced three pups -- males Remus and Romulus born in October, and female Khaleesi born in January -- as dire wolves, but made only 20 genetic edits to grey wolves.

Beth Shapiro of Colossal told New Scientist that just 15 modifications were based on dire wolf DNA, primarily targeting size, musculature and ear shape. Five other changes involve mutations known to produce light coats in grey wolves. A 2021 DNA study revealed dire wolves and grey wolves last shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago, with jackals and African wild dogs more closely related to grey wolves.

No, the Dire Wolf Has Not Been Brought Back From Extinction More | Reply

No, the Dire Wolf Has Not Been Brought Back From Extinction

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  • The wolf came in, I got my cards
    We sat down for a game
    I cut my deck to the queen of spades
    But the cards were all the same

  • great idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @12:24AM (#65288745)

    We barely understand the environment enough to safely bring back animals that went extinct in the past 250 years. Why would it be a good idea to bring back a super-predator that would outcompete the closest relatives, and decimate all their prey (and all kinds of other fun new things they will decide to eat)?

    That sounds stupid.

    Why did they pick this one? Because they can't actually do it. But it is relatively easy to make a few edits, creating a new breed of wolf that is somewhat larger than the existing ones. (Still not a benefit;) And because they can make the color of its coat look more similar to the extinct one (but still not the same). And the result is a non-beneficial breed, fraudulently advertised as bringing back an extinct species. For the purpose of showing the company can DO something/anythiing, so it can GET MORE FUNDING.

    However, they have already thoroughly illustrated that they do not have any motivation for planetary benefit, that they will act against us, that they are irresponsible, and that they are money-grubbing liars. Who have access to standard gene editing technology (CRISPR I presume).

    Yay.

    • The answer is simple: The dire wolf is probably actually an inferior predator than the modern wolf. It might be bigger, but not better.

      • Selective breeding (Score:3, Interesting)

        by will4 ( 7250692 )

        Oddly, how the centuries of selectively breeding domesticated animals is never discussed as possibly harmful to the ecosystem.

        https://wildlife.org/australia... [wildlife.org]
        Australia uses poison sausages to tackle feral cat problem -- April 29, 2019 by The Wildlife Society

        Australia has eliminated an estimated 211,560 feral cats since it decided in 2015 to kill 2 million of them by 2020. The cats prey on threatened rodent and marsupial species native to the country. As part of their effort to eradicate the cats, wildlife

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          If you never see it discussed, then you are selective in your reading.

          OTOH, domesticated animals and plants have LOTS of defenders. Many more, and better funded, than do the defenders of the wild, and those are more numerous than the defenders of genetically modified innovations. (Not necessarily better funded, though.)

        • https://wildlife.org/australia... [wildlife.org] Australia uses poison sausages to tackle feral cat problem -- April 29, 2019 by The Wildlife Society

          So do any people or pets ever eat these? Poison sausages are WEAK! In the US, they use CYANIDE BOMBS [theguardian.com].

    • Re:great idea (Score:4, Funny)

      by OrangAsm ( 678078 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @01:33AM (#65288849)

      I'm guessing it's due to them being featured on Game of Thrones, a show about medieval toiletry.

    • Re:great idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @01:37AM (#65288855)

      It's virtually guaranteed their wolf won't act like a Dire wolf. What's suspicious is that it only took 15 gene edits -- that strongly points to them matching on a few phenotypic features. For reference two random humans have single digit millions difference in their DNA (granted maybe only a few thousand or less actually make a difference). Anyway, this is the genetic engineering equivalent of a brunette dying her hair and claiming to be a blonde. Or a chick wearing makeup and claiming that's her face. You remember when a zoo in China dressed a dog up as a lion? Part of what makes a Dire Wolf a Dire wolf is its behavioral characteristics, behavior that's deeply encoded in many parts of the genome.

      • Re:great idea (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @02:44AM (#65288945)
        It's more than that. Behavior is not necessarily in the genome. Wolves in particular have a culture to them; they grow up in packs and are trained. That culture, like human cultures, is byproduct of their environment. DNA is not the code of life the way it's been discussed, it's simply an important, but not the only, piece in a vast puzzle that makes up living organisms.

        Dire wolves existed at a period in time when the environment supported it. Climate change (mostly the ice age ending) led to the extinction of various forms of megafauna like the wooly mammoth [colossal.com] (which Colossal also aims to bring back), which led to the extinction of their species. They fit within an ecological niche for the environment at the time, and they're gone because that environment is now gone too. Bringing them back won't change that; dire wolves and wooly mammoths cannot survive today not because of their genomes but because the global environment doesn't support megafauna any more.

        But also, understand what Colossal Biosciences actually is. It's a story. It makes cool sense to "bring back wooly mammoths". It's better than "bringing back dinosaurs" because those creatures are closer to our own time and Jurassic Park put the kibosh on that. As you correctly pointed out, these aren't dire wolves, they're grey wolves with a few gene edits; we're genetically closer to bananas than these things are to true dire wolves. That's not the point. The point is the story, which helps them raise money, do cool science, and develop tools around life science that they then spin out to create new businesses [businesswire.com], and make educational videos [youtube.com] about ecological preservation. It's not a bad idea overall, but they do misrepresent what they're doing for the sake of the story and sound like hippy idiots [cbr.com] to make the emotional play on what they're doing.

        It's a weird company.

        • Climate change (mostly the ice age ending) led to the extinction of various forms of megafauna like the wooly mammoth [colossal.com] (which Colossal also aims to bring back), which led to the extinction of their species.

          That's a weird way to spell "Humans murdered the shit out of megafauna more and more efficiently as they moved to areas where local megafauna didn't have time to evolve even behavioral defenses against human predation." [ourworldindata.org] Climate change moved roughly in sync across the globe, human arrival did not, and guess which one is more tightly correlated with mass extinctions selectively targeting megafauna?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Sorry, but the claim "we're genetically closer to bananas than these things are to true dire wolves." is just bonkers, and detracts from the rest of your argument. We aren't even closer to dire wolves than these things are. They're probably about as close to dire wolves as we are to, oh, orangutans.

        • It's more than that. Behavior is not necessarily in the genome. Wolves in particular have a culture to them; they grow up in packs and are trained. That culture, like human cultures, is byproduct of their environment. DNA is not the code of life the way it's been discussed, it's simply an important, but not the only, piece in a vast puzzle that makes up living organisms.

          That's a compelling take, and I appreciate your emphasis on culture and environment. But I want to push back a little on your claim that "Behavior is not necessarily in the genome." I'd argue it's more accurate to say that behavior is an emergent property of the genome, expressed through and modified by environmental interaction. I think we’re looking at the same thing here, just through different lenses.

          Wolves do have culture, absolutely—but even their ability to have culture is genetically sca

          • Hey, a valid, well thought out argument! Far better than the other responses I got.

            I'm not super technical, but I do work in this industry so I know a lot of what's going on. I would agree with you that certain behaviors can be linked to the genome, and in fact culture can influence how a genome evolves over generations. The purpose of my post was two fold however:

            1) to challenge the standard assumption that we are nothing more than our DNA. We are far more than our DNA. A perfect example is sev

            • Lions raised in captivity act like lions when released back into the wild (see story of Christian the Lion, and others) .. after a few days of "wtf?" they revert to their encoded behaviors .. they'll form packs they gather a group of females and the females won't fight each other within the harem. These are complex traits. Now if you released a tiger into the wild or even tried to get it raised by a lioness, there's no way he's getting himself a harem, rising a pride, and acting like a lion. Vice versa is t

              • That's not really accurate. Christian the Lion when released was under the care of George Adamson [wikipedia.org], who specialized in training lions not born in the wild to learn to integrate into the wild. It required the care and oversight of a professional wildlife conservationist who specialized in this. Christian was introduced to a pride that Adamson effectively seeded and created with lions he personally trained to survive in the wild, so I would argue he is a special case. Another special case would be the Cali [wikipedia.org]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by BranMan ( 29917 )

              Obviously they are breeding Wooley Mammoths and Wooly Mice so they can see if the Wooley Mammoths are afraid of the Wooley Mice. [They are MythBusters fans]

        • Are you suggesting that Colossal is working on Phase 1 of its secret plan to Bring Back the Ice Age?!? ;)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by erice ( 13380 )

          we're genetically closer to bananas than these things are to true dire wolves

          "genetically closer to bananas" is a phrase from discussions about hypothetical life evolved on other planets. The idea is that humans are more closely related to all life on Earth, even bananas, then to any sentient or non-sentient life evolved on another world. It makes no sense to use this phrase about recently extinct Earth species like the Dire Wolf. Colossal Biosciences' creation may not be dire wolves but both real and phony wolves are canids. They are much more closely related to each other and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        them matching on a few phenotypic features

        If that.

        Given that we don't exactly have HD videos from 12,000 BC what they're doing is at best making guesses at what might be a few phenotypic features.

    • The focus is on Woolly Mammoth, and apparently it does have ecological benefit. Along the way there will be some woolly mice (and dire wolves I guess?) because gestating a mammoth takes 2 years and is rather expensive. It's an interesting project.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Mammoths *might* be reasonable...but not woolly ones. Even so I doubt there's any place they could live. It would probably be more reasonable to modify some elephants to have the desired characteristics, and not pretend that you're "bringing back the mammoth".

        • They can live where they used to live. People don't realize that they went extinct only 4000 years ago and for reasons unrelated to climate.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            But can they? The environment has changed a LOT in the last few thousand years. The place they used to live is now likely to be someone's pasture.

    • Relax, these aren't actual Dire Wolves. They're designer gray wolves, and will probably be available to buy as status symbols for the super-rich before much longer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by necro81 ( 917438 )
        I'm holding out for a tiger with wicked-long ears [google.com].

      • Relax, these aren't actual Dire Wolves. They're designer gray wolves, and will probably be available to buy as status symbols for the super-rich before much longer.

        Honestly? I figured that was the entire purpose of their Dire Wolf focus. Lots of people liked the Dire Wolves in the books. The show pretty much ruined the whole point of the Dire Wolves, but people still liked the little they showed of them. Of course some ultra-wealthy person out there is going to want to have one or more, perhaps one for each of their children, and the runt of the litter for their step-kid. I expect we'll be seeing them featured in red carpet events as "service animals for the ultra-eli

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      The evolutionary process doesn't really think things through and is to a high degree a bunch of random genetic modifications where it doesn't understand the outcome. What's the difference?

  • If they can bring back direwolves, wolly mammoths, and other extinct species...

    BRING BACK HONEST POLITICIANS.

    Oh wait. Trump fired all the scientists. Because they could "do science".

    If only they could "do math".
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • What honest politicians?

      • I think he means the ones that would say they would help the people that vote for them and then tried but couldn't do it all for legitimate reasons. As opposed to Trump, who tells his followers he will make the world better for them and then starts to fire them and raise prices on them so his friends don't have to pay taxes.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tom ( 822 )

          Well, the taxpayers pay $400,000 per year for Donald, for a total of 1.6 million.

          His friends paid several times that in campaign contributions. So basically, everyone gets what they paid for.

          • How does higher prices for gas, cars, houses, rent, utilities, groceries, basically everything come to 400k? Also how do you even put a value on cutting down hundreds of years old trees to turn into lumber?

            • Gas prices are actually going down...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Tom ( 822 )

              I'm talking about the price paid, not the profit or losses incurred.

              And, of course, a bit tongue-in-cheek.

              Basically: Since campaigning in the US costs countless billions, we shouldn't be surprised that politicians are all bought. It's the only way to get anywhere.

          • Well, the taxpayers pay $400,000 per year for Donald, for a total of 1.6 million.

            You're forgetting the millions we taxpayers are paying for his weekly golf outings.

      • Bernie Sanders.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Have those ever existed?

      Remember that history is written to tell the story that those who hold power want to be told. It's only when it's no longer (obviously) relevant that historians tell the truth...and by then they're relying on records that were written when it was relevant.

      Hint: There never was a "golden age" in the past. Not for most of the people. (Well, there are arguments the most of the time in pre-agricultural groups it was better for most people...but don't be too sure about that. There's

  • I think these people are so preoccupied with whether they could bring back Dire Wolves that they didn't stop to think about whether they should.

  • The company took grey wolf DNA and edited it to be *genetically identical* to dire wolves.

    Trying to claim that "these aren't real dire wolves" because the DNA was edited instead of natural is like opening a Ship Of Theseus debate. It's not relevant outside of philosophy.

    If they allow these wolves to breed - which they plan to - the next generation will be 100% dire wolf.

    • The company took grey wolf DNA and edited it to be *genetically identical* to dire wolves.

      There are many thousands of important differences and far more less important ones and they only changed a handful, not even 100. So these are really about 15/7843rds dire wolf or something. Not zero, but closer to that than 1 if you must be binary.

      If they allow these wolves to breed - which they plan to - the next generation will be 100% dire wolf.

      The result will likely be more grey wolf than the parents because of how genetics work, probably not a pure grey wolf, but that’s somewhat plausible because they added so few genes and selection at fertilization is quite random.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by muntjac ( 805565 )
      did you even read the article or any other related article? its not even close to 100% dire wolf DNA. here's another article pointing out just exactly how wrong you are. https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]

  • Tech bro scientists (Score:3, Insightful)

    by muntjac ( 805565 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @10:42AM (#65289655)
    I hate these headlines saying "scientists say they brought back dire wolf" (see wired). This is giving science such a bad name. this is a PR stunt by a startup that obviously has no morals or integrity.

  • their lie still got their headline. Still got them attention. Still got investor dollars and increased valuation.

    We live in a post-truth society where value isn't based on anything real.

  • Good (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    My kitty cat was terrified by the news. He's been in hiding for the past few days.

    "It's OK, saber-toothed kitty. The mean old wolf isn't coming after all."

  • Look up Secret Of Skinwalker Ranch, S05E03. They find a carcass that seems to match the real thing... that still had musculature and skin on the carcass.

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