The Return of the Dire Wolf

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Source: Colossal Laboratories

Good morning! Scientists bring the Ice Age dire wolf back from extinction—sort of: “The modern dire wolves, Romulus and Remus, born in October, plus a third, younger pup, Khaleesi, born in January, are the results of efforts by bioscience startup Colossal, which launched in 2021. You may know the company for recently producing headline-grabbing and objectively adorable woolly mice as part of their cornerstone effort to bring back the woolly mammoth, but Colossal’s dire wolf project has since outpaced the mammoth, thanks to an abundance of science — both genetic and reproductive — available about dogs compared to elephants . . . It is impossible for the DNA of these new cells to be 100 percent identical to their prehistoric ancestors. ‘There’s probably millions of differences between gray wolves and dire wolves, and the DNA editing technology is not sufficiently robust that we can make all of those changes simultaneously without causing the cell to melt down,’ Shapiro says. ‘Until we can synthesize a whole genome from scratch, we can’t make something that’s 100 percent genetically identical, but it’s also not necessary, because what we’re trying to do is create a functional equivalent of that species that used to be there.’” Here’s more—including photos and videos—from Time.