Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this.
Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"
Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked.
That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number of species if and when they're in danger.
Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park that wealthy and middle class people can visit.
> "He explained that I was looking at a plan for a restored ecosystem. It was also a perfectly adapted money machine. There was a large area where the ancient elephants could graze, and this would be funded, in part, by carbon-offset payments from governments and corporations. The carbon value of a single elephant is about two million dollars, he told me. (An elephant increases biodiversity, in part, by spreading seeds in its dung and by crushing dense vegetation on forest floors, giving slow-growing trees the space to survive.) He added that the interesting educational opportunities and “sexiness factor” of Colossal’s creations would make its carbon credits “trade at a premium.”"
So it's a startup, valued at 10 billion?!
How exactly do they plan to make money?
Seriously, could anything be more 21st-century? Resurrecting extinct animal species (ones that supposedly went extinct naturally, mind you, not because of humans – what's the point then?) just to reintroduce them into parks and sell carbon credits.
Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
> Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.
The process seems to have dictated this. They needed an easy surrogate, a dog, and wolves required no need of introducing anything new into the genome, it's "just" reactivating what is already there.
Haven’t read full article either. But dogs have an incredibly well studied genome and are generally incredibly well understood. And due to cloning efforts, performing implantation of lab grown embryos is established protocol. Wolves are also well studied and understood, so even tho dire wolves aren’t super closely related, the dog baseline is a great control.
This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we don’t know well.
From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :
> Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, “It’s been almost twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were established, and those culture conditions have not worked for other bird species, even ones that are really closely related, like quail.” She added that, despite the dearth of related research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-egg precursors in birds: “We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we can start doing some migration assays”—a technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of endangered birds. The team had already identified some species that could use the help.
I would guess that it has to do with much more available genetic information on dogs and more existing CRISPR work with them. However, I do not know if these wolves will give us a lot of information.
That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).
Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it? Biological categories like species are fuzzy anyway. There is tremendous variation within each species. But where do you draw a line?
It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?
Yes, species/lineage/population distinctions are quite fuzzy at the level of divergence under consideration here (dire wolves vs gray wolves).
Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:
After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal’s study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome.
20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color, however:
But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem: they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that, when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat.
So the coat color alleles are NOT the dire wolf alleles.
I have to agree. While this is a very cool achievement and I'm excited to see what this company does next, it seems disingenuous to claim they brought a species back from extinction. The pups are still genetically much more like modern wolves than they are dire wolves.
This is a deeply philosophical question. But it's highly dependent on the circumstances of a particular animal's extinction. Is it ethical to resurrect the Wolly Mammoth into our current climate when it's significantly warmer than the climate of the Ice Age? Likely not.
Was a species hunted to extinction? Maybe restoring that population would ease our collective conscience to some minuet degree.
So maybe bringing back some of these species is being done so as an apologetic gesture? Perhaps out of hubris?
To be fair, we're notoriously cruel to the animals that we farm for mass food production and less directly to wild animals (when human activity destroys their habitat). Images of such farm operations might remind you of conditions imposed on alleged dissedents by dictatorial regimes. You know, those same conditions that are condemned as atrocious when imposed on humans by humans. And this kind of treatment is still absolutely prevalent today on humans and other animals.
Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.
A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.
Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample and eat everything they find because there is no natural control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin out their numbers.
>>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?
Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?
>> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains. Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.
farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.
Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.
Meanings shift with time. The original meant that (doled out as a very harsh collective punishment by the Romans: groups of 10 would draw straws and be forced to kill the one who draw the short straw). Now it's meanining is more along the lines of 'severely reduced', where how much is 'severely' depends on the context.
I think this one is already past the past the inflection point, to be honest. I see people using the word with the new meaning far more than the old one; hell, I see people complaining about how the word is used more than I see it used for the original meaning. My take is that the original meaning is so narrow that it's almost inevitable that any more broad usage that appeared would overtake it to the point of drowning out the original.
I would say it's more that they don't know the meaning of decimated. Or they don't know the original meaning of the word. Now when someone writes that a population was decimated they probably just mean it was massively reduced. I have also seen articles saying a sports team decimated their opponent, which in that context means the winning team won by a large margin.
Decimated is from Latin decimātiō, where a large group of your army would be split into groups of 10, each group would draw straws, and the shortest straw would be stoned to death by the other 9. A completely brutal form of military punishment for capital offenses such as cowardice. It is not really adequately captured by reducing it to "kill one in every 10".
Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it doesn't really make sense to me that there would be some inherent meaning that overrides that. Language evolving isn't a new thing, and once a meaning reaches enough mindshare, there's no turning back.
Using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has become more common over the past few decades, rather than using it in the older sense of "having no stake in the outcome, having no bias or partiality with respect to a conflict."
An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested" in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.
The short answer is that disinterested means unbiased, having no conflicts of interest, impartial. So a judge in a court should be disinterested, but not uninterested.
Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this.
Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de...
Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked.
That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number of species if and when they're in danger.
Why would a zoo or something just be for wealthy people
Investors expect returns on the hundreds of millions of dollars they've invested.
At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford cars. This does not seem like a very argument against anything new.
Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and mammoths to work in a few years...
We'll perhaps visit them at the zoo.
Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park that wealthy and middle class people can visit.
I'm unsure we want or need a real Dire Wolf, but American Alsatians have been bred for a while: https://www.marvelousdogs.com/american-alsatian/
Archive.org link
https://web.archive.org/web/20250407131025/https://www.newyo...
Subscribe now to witness the rise of the Dire Wolves, step by primal step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPX4tm-J2bU
Colossal has just released a 1970s style nature documentary about the Dire Wolf pups (now quite large)
There is an article about this in Time magazine, no paywall. https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
Thanks, that's a terrific article
> "He explained that I was looking at a plan for a restored ecosystem. It was also a perfectly adapted money machine. There was a large area where the ancient elephants could graze, and this would be funded, in part, by carbon-offset payments from governments and corporations. The carbon value of a single elephant is about two million dollars, he told me. (An elephant increases biodiversity, in part, by spreading seeds in its dung and by crushing dense vegetation on forest floors, giving slow-growing trees the space to survive.) He added that the interesting educational opportunities and “sexiness factor” of Colossal’s creations would make its carbon credits “trade at a premium.”"
So it's a startup, valued at 10 billion?! How exactly do they plan to make money?
Seriously, could anything be more 21st-century? Resurrecting extinct animal species (ones that supposedly went extinct naturally, mind you, not because of humans – what's the point then?) just to reintroduce them into parks and sell carbon credits.
Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
> Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.
The process seems to have dictated this. They needed an easy surrogate, a dog, and wolves required no need of introducing anything new into the genome, it's "just" reactivating what is already there.
Haven’t read full article either. But dogs have an incredibly well studied genome and are generally incredibly well understood. And due to cloning efforts, performing implantation of lab grown embryos is established protocol. Wolves are also well studied and understood, so even tho dire wolves aren’t super closely related, the dog baseline is a great control.
This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we don’t know well.
From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :
> Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, “It’s been almost twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were established, and those culture conditions have not worked for other bird species, even ones that are really closely related, like quail.” She added that, despite the dearth of related research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-egg precursors in birds: “We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we can start doing some migration assays”—a technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of endangered birds. The team had already identified some species that could use the help.
We have robust cloning protocols for dogs. For some reason dogs are really amenable to cloning.
I'm guessing it's a mixture of practical concerns and something that captures the imagination of investors.
Birds are more difficult to clone than mammals. I don't think we've been able to clone one yet.
I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.
I would guess that it has to do with much more available genetic information on dogs and more existing CRISPR work with them. However, I do not know if these wolves will give us a lot of information.
That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).
My guess is that it is indeed because they're charismatic megafauna.
Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it? Biological categories like species are fuzzy anyway. There is tremendous variation within each species. But where do you draw a line?
It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?
Yes, species/lineage/population distinctions are quite fuzzy at the level of divergence under consideration here (dire wolves vs gray wolves).
Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:
After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal’s study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome.
20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color, however:
But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem: they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that, when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat.
So the coat color alleles are NOT the dire wolf alleles.
I have to agree. While this is a very cool achievement and I'm excited to see what this company does next, it seems disingenuous to claim they brought a species back from extinction. The pups are still genetically much more like modern wolves than they are dire wolves.
> Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it?
Only the Marketing Dept. (and some gullible-when-it-pays-to-be reporters) think they are Dire Wolves.
Very cool, but is it ethical?
Would it be ethical to let all this lightning striking the castle's copper spire go to waste?
Mad Science means never having to ask “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Please provide the unethical case
Ethically, how is it different from (say) Kentucky Kennels LLC trying to breed some Great Danes which drool less?
This is a deeply philosophical question. But it's highly dependent on the circumstances of a particular animal's extinction. Is it ethical to resurrect the Wolly Mammoth into our current climate when it's significantly warmer than the climate of the Ice Age? Likely not.
Was a species hunted to extinction? Maybe restoring that population would ease our collective conscience to some minuet degree.
So maybe bringing back some of these species is being done so as an apologetic gesture? Perhaps out of hubris?
To be fair, we're notoriously cruel to the animals that we farm for mass food production and less directly to wild animals (when human activity destroys their habitat). Images of such farm operations might remind you of conditions imposed on alleged dissedents by dictatorial regimes. You know, those same conditions that are condemned as atrocious when imposed on humans by humans. And this kind of treatment is still absolutely prevalent today on humans and other animals.
Hmmm, are you suggesting that the scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think whether or not they should?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0
We cause lots of things to go extinct. Doesn't seem any worse.
So disappointed that this isn't an article about the Grateful Dead
I got really excited that it's about Minecraft's once popular modpack
In the timbers of fennario..
The wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold
Froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me...
Username checks out
I never realised the Dire Wolf was a real historical animal, not just a fantasy one like the Owlbear.
It's not just an MtG card.
https://scryfall.com/card/ice/230/dire-wolves
Even if it weren't a real extinct animal it wouldn't have just been an MtG card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_Wolf_(song)
Oh shit, the next instagram thing will be DnD cosplayers trying to get selfies with them.
I think Game of Thrones cosplayers would be more likely
We're overdue for a horse archer empire as well
Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.
A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.
Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample and eat everything they find because there is no natural control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin out their numbers.
>>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?
Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?
>> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains. Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.
Don't farmers get reimbursed for livestock lost to natural predators?
farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.
[dead]
Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.
Meanings shift with time. The original meant that (doled out as a very harsh collective punishment by the Romans: groups of 10 would draw straws and be forced to kill the one who draw the short straw). Now it's meanining is more along the lines of 'severely reduced', where how much is 'severely' depends on the context.
indeed, this particular one though has the added complication of having part of it's meaning contained in the composition of the word.
It's usage is still changing, obviously , but for me it's a more difficult transition because of the 'deci'
I think this one is already past the past the inflection point, to be honest. I see people using the word with the new meaning far more than the old one; hell, I see people complaining about how the word is used more than I see it used for the original meaning. My take is that the original meaning is so narrow that it's almost inevitable that any more broad usage that appeared would overtake it to the point of drowning out the original.
I would say it's more that they don't know the meaning of decimated. Or they don't know the original meaning of the word. Now when someone writes that a population was decimated they probably just mean it was massively reduced. I have also seen articles saying a sports team decimated their opponent, which in that context means the winning team won by a large margin.
Decimated is from Latin decimātiō, where a large group of your army would be split into groups of 10, each group would draw straws, and the shortest straw would be stoned to death by the other 9. A completely brutal form of military punishment for capital offenses such as cowardice. It is not really adequately captured by reducing it to "kill one in every 10".
Wikipedia says it may be ahistorical though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)
It also notes "In modern English, the word is used most commonly not to mean a destruction of a tenth but rather annihilation."
Semi-related: very few people, even capable professional writers, use "disinterested" correctly.
Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it doesn't really make sense to me that there would be some inherent meaning that overrides that. Language evolving isn't a new thing, and once a meaning reaches enough mindshare, there's no turning back.
Can you provide an example? I'm not sure how one would use it improperly...
Using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has become more common over the past few decades, rather than using it in the older sense of "having no stake in the outcome, having no bias or partiality with respect to a conflict."
An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested" in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.
The short answer is that disinterested means unbiased, having no conflicts of interest, impartial. So a judge in a court should be disinterested, but not uninterested.
It is often erroneously used when the writer means uninterested.