Lights and shadows on the "return" of dire wolves
Environment — di Giulia Assogna
American company Colossal has announced the birth of three dire wolves, a wolf species that went extinct ten thousand years ago.
Lights and shadows on the "return" of dire wolves
American company Colossal has announced the birth of three dire wolves, a wolf species that went extinct ten thousand years ago.
"For the first time in human history, Colossal has successfully restored an extinct species through the science of de-extinction. After more than ten thousand years of absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem." With these triumphant words, the American biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Laboratories&Biosciences presented to the world the successful birth of three dire wolves (dire wolf), i.e. large canids that lived in North America between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely driven to extinction in part by the arrival of an even more ruthless predator: human beings.
The three "de-extincted" dire wolves — two born in October 2024 and one in January 2025 — are in good health. The males, Romulus and Remus, are named after the two mythical twins raised by the she-wolf of Rome. The female, named Khaleesi, is a clear reference to Queen Daenerys Targaryen from George R.R. Martin's fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, immortalised by the television adaptation Game of Thrones. And it goes without saying that the name was not chosen by chance. It was Colossal itself that stated that an important aspect of the de-extinction operation was precisely the dire wolf's fame, owing to the hugely successful series in which members of House Stark own several specimens of this mythical animal.
Not only that. Dire wolves have also become iconic protagonists of well-known role-playing games, such as Magic and Dungeons and Dragons. A recipe with enough ingredients to capture the public's imagination, generate media buzz, win over a sizeable fanbase, and thus allow Colossal to declare that "the successful birth of three dire wolves is a revolutionary milestone in scientific progress, illustrating yet another leap forward in de-extinction technologies".
An apparently extraordinary result, then, which on 7 April earned a place of honour in the international press, receiving, among other things, a lengthy article in the New York Times and a celebratory cover in Time. If it were all true, these would be the first dire wolves to walk our planet in over ten thousand years, and their birth the first successful de-extinction achieved through genetic engineering.
SOUND ON. You're hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years. Meet Romulus and Remus—the world's first de-extinct animals, born on October 1, 2024.
The dire wolf has been extinct for over 10,000 years. These two wolves were brought back from extinction using
The dire wolf has been extinct for over 10,000 years. These two wolves were brought back from extinction using
When all is said and done, however, there is little to celebrate. The whole thing looks more like a large-scale media operation. What have actually been born are, de facto, little more than grey wolves genetically modified to resemble ancient dire wolves. Let us try to understand how.
Who was the dire wolf
The dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, which lived in North America until around 13,000 years ago, was a carnivore larger than a modern wolf, with teeth adapted for crushing the bones of large herbivores. It had a slightly broader head, a pale, thick coat and a stronger jaw than the wolf we know today. Its diet consisted of at least seventy per cent meat, drawn primarily from horses and bison, and it lived on the vast American prairies alongside felines, giant bears and giant ground sloths — species that failed to adapt to the upheavals of the end of the Pleistocene. But the American company Colossal, whose stated objective is to create innovative technologies for species restoration and the repopulation of ecosystems, has not truly brought it back to life, as it would have us believe.
The dire wolf time machine
So what actually happened? Researchers extracted dire wolf DNA from two ancient bone fragments: a tooth dating back around 13,000 years and an inner ear bone dated to approximately 72,000 years ago, both found in North America. They thus succeeded in synthetically reconstructing the best dire wolf genetic sequence currently available — still fragmentary and perhaps far from the original — which made it possible to better understand the evolutionary relationship between these animals and modern grey wolves (Canis lupus), their closest living relatives. The analysis also revealed that dire wolves have a hybrid ancestry. They are thought to have emerged between 3.5 and 2.5 million years ago as a result of hybridisation between an ancient canid and a member of wolf-like families, including jackals and African wild dogs.
By studying and comparing genetic differences, the researchers then selected 14 genes they believe to be the primary drivers of the differences between the species, at least in terms of characteristic phenotypic traits such as size, musculature, appearance, coat colour and coat length. Working within a modern grey wolf cell, the scientists then altered these genes in the laboratory, introducing a total of twenty mutations across the entire genome. With a few precautions. They targeted Corin, for example, a serine protease expressed in hair follicles that influences coat colour, in order to make it lighter. And, after a great deal of work, they used the uteruses of three surrogate wolf mothers to carry the pregnancies of the dire wolves Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi to term — animals that today display a white coat and the appearance of large, muscular wolves. They live in a secret location, within a protected nature reserve, which they will never be able to leave.
It would appear to be a rigorous protocol, yet there is not a single scientific publication to be found. No peer-reviewed article has been published in any scientific journal. Colossal has merely released a lengthy press release explaining the details of the operation and making a number of photographs available. On the dedicated website a video is also available in which users can follow the growth of the dire wolves — animals that resemble the extinct ones in appearance, but certainly not in behaviour, ecology or social capabilities. By Colossal's own admission, in fact, the goal is to create only "functional equivalents" of species that once lived and no longer exist. Not new dire wolves, to be clear, but wolves that look like dire wolves.
Functional de-extinction uses the safest and most effective approach to bring back the lost phenotypes that make an extinct species unique.
Beth Alison Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences
Red wolves open new opportunities for conservation
Beyond the ethical and ecological implications of de-extinction — which Colossal is also pursuing with mammoths — we must not forget that the sixth mass extinction is currently underway. And that, despite global biodiversity agreements, we are currently losing animal species at a rate never seen before. Amphibians, plants, invertebrates and more. Reading about de-extincted dire wolves is a bitter reminder of how many resources could be devoted by such wealthy companies — Colossal has raised 435 million dollars and claims a valuation of 10.2 billion dollars — to the protection of already-existing but less iconic species, which are in desperate need of funding yet are instead allowed to vanish in complete silence, often before we have even discovered them.
@aionismus We call it a dire wolf because it's derived from ancient dire wolf DNA. It's part of functional de-extinction—the creation of organisms that resemble and are genetically similar to extinct species, with engineered traits to help them thrive in the modern world.
And yet, a positive aspect can be found in all of this. The technology developed by Colossal does in fact have immediate applications for conservation efforts. The dire wolf operation was carried out in parallel with one that led to the birth of one female and three male red wolves (Canis rufus), a species currently considered "critically endangered." Once very common across eastern North America, their numbers began to decline sharply around the 1960s. Fewer than twenty individuals now remain in the wild, while another 270 are enrolled in captive breeding programmes, with the ultimate goal of reintroducing them into the wild. All living specimens descend from just 12 original individuals, and the low genetic variability represents a serious threat to the species' long-term survival.
It is precisely this critical issue that Colossal's biotechnology has addressed, using a novel cloning technique to produce four red wolves non-invasively by harvesting endothelial progenitor cells from blood. According to the company, adding these animals to the captive breeding population would increase the number of founding lineages by 25 per cent, thereby boosting genetic variability. This procedure could prove truly revolutionary for the future, offering at-risk animal and plant populations an expanded gene pool and thus a last chance at survival.
It may not be front-page news, but it is an effective demonstration that progress and biotechnology can genuinely contribute to the safeguarding and restoration of biodiversity. Much to the satisfaction of Queen Khaleesi.