Is this a real dire wolf?
Here’s a fact of life: Species go extinct.
Earth, in its history, has been home to about five billion species. But today, only about ten to fifteen million still exist. In other words, more than 99.9 percent of all species ever to have lived have gone extinct. After the last members of a species die, that species is gone forever. Or is it?
The dire wolf is a species of canine that lived in the Americas. We know about them from fossils that have been discovered from modern-day Alaska to Peru. The dire wolf shared some characteristics with today’s gray wolf. The dire wolf was bigger than today’s gray wolf—growing up to 60 kilograms—with large teeth and a powerful jaw. It likely had a light-colored coat.
You may already be familiar with the dire wolf. That’s the wolf from “Game of Thrones,” the books and the hugely popular TV series. The dire wolf is also in the “Dungeons & Dragons” video game and in the fantasy card game, “Magic: the Gathering.”
The dire wolf was a real animal, but it went extinct about ten thousand years ago, probably because of environmental change and competition for food. Humans had just started hunting, and humans hunted many of the same large animals that the dire wolf preyed on.
Now, though, a biotech startup in Texas says it has brought the dire wolf back from extinction, the first time a species has ever been revived. Colossal Biosciences, a private company, recently gave life to two wolf pups—Romulus and Remus, named after the twin founders of Rome in ancient mythology.
Romulus and Remus are about a year old. They have four legs, two eyes, a bright white fur coat, and they behave similar to wolves. Are they “dire wolves,” as the company says—and if not, what are they?
Let’s start with what Colossal did. The company set out to recreate the dire wolf, and they used two main ingredients. First, they carefully extracted DNA specimens from known dire wolf fossils. They took samples from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old bone fragment. DNA from fossils is often degraded, but there was enough genetic information in these samples to identify traits like body size, coat color, and jaw structure.
The next step was to find a close living cousin to fill in the gaps in DNA. That’s because the full dire wolf’s DNA was not available from the fossils. The closest living cousin was the gray wolf, the most common modern wolf species. Colossal would start with the gray wolf’s DNA, and modify it based on what they learned from the dire wolf DNA samples.
They made edits to just 14 genes. Here’s one example. They found a gene that controls size. They swapped out the gray wolf gene for the dire wolf gene, which would cause the animal to grow much larger. Another set of edits would control the color of the coat.
After they completed the gene editing, they had modern wolf cells with partially-modified DNA. The next step was to create a living, viable animal from these cells. To do that, they used a surrogate. They inserted the nucleus of the edited wolf cell into a domestic dog’s egg, creating an embryo. They implanted the embryo into a dog—the dog was now pregnant with wolf-like pups.
After a 62-day gestation period, scientists performed a C-section birth and welcomed two white wolf-like creatures into the world—both male. A female, named Khaleesi, was born a few months later.
Romulus and Remus are developing the way the scientists expected. They’re growing bigger than gray wolves, on track to weight about 60 to 65 kilograms. They have thick, white fur—much different from gray wolves. They play, howl, and explore; like other wolves, they’re shy around humans. By all accounts, they are healthy and normal. They live in a 2,000-acre preserve in the United States. The specific location has not been disclosed.
The three wolves—two male and one female—have already formed a small pack. The female, Khaleesi, will reach reproductive age in about two years. At that point, the new wolves are expected to be able to reproduce.
So the question is: are they dire wolves? Colossal, the company that did the experiment, calls them by the same scientific name as the extinct dire wolf. But most independent scientists would not go that far.
They are not an exact DNA match for the extinct species. They are a new type of animal—they have DNA mostly from gray wolves, with modifications to match our best possible understanding of the extinct dire wolves. A lot of the dire wolf DNA is simply not available.
And remember how the gray wolf is the closest living cousin? That’s true—but they’re not as close as they seem. The two species diverged into different branches of the evolutionary tree millions of years ago. The gray wolf may be the closest living relative, but the two species are not close, genetically speaking. A dire wolf that lived 10,000 years ago would not have been able to breed with a gray wolf—and neither would it be able to breed with the animal that Colossal created.
So the dire wolf—the species that lived many thousands of years ago—that dire wolf is not back. But that didn’t stop Colossal from breathlessly championing a de-extinction. Many media outlets ran with the story, skipping over details about how dissimilar the new pups are from dire wolves from long ago.
The company, Colossal, is currently working on doing the same for other species. The dodo bird went extinct in the late 1600s. That was a bird on an island off the coast of Africa that did not fly. The wooly mammoth was an elephant-like animal, native to the Arctic tundra; it went extinct anywhere between four and ten thousand years ago.
Jeff’s take
Here are two perspectives for you; you can decide for yourself which one you like. Here’s one. Humans are bringing other species down. We, and our technological progress, are responsible for the extinction of many other species. So why would we not use our intelligence and our technology to do something good, to undo some of the harm humans have done?
Here’s another perspective. Often when humans attempt to interfere with biology, we do more harm than good. There are a million living species at risk of going extinct today—wouldn’t it be better to save those, than to promote a false undo button on previously-extinct species?
This perspective says that the “de-extinction” of the dire wolf is not a de-extinction at all. It’s just a synthetic animal that only looks like an extinct animal—or, more accurately, looks like what we think an extinct animal might have looked like. A rough copy, in other words—a copy to make us feel like we’re doing something good. Meanwhile, real, living animal species are threatened by habitat loss, invasive species, disease, and poaching.
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