At the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, scientists were able to successfully bring back dire wolves. Dire wolves went extinct over 13,000 years ago, one would think that we should leave that behind, but Colossal Biosciences, a company based in Dallas, Texas, disagrees.
“Preserving, expanding, and testing genetic diversity should be done well before important endangered animal species like the red wolf are lost,” Harvard geneticist and co-founder of Colossal, Dr. George Church said.
These dire puppies are named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. And they are genetically modified wolves made from a 13,000-year-old tooth and an 83,000-year-old skull. These puppies were grown in the womb of an average domestic dog, but these puppies could be considered closer to a designer dog than a wolf.
One of the puppies, Khaleesi, was named after a Game of Thrones character featured on HBO. The reason for the naming was that ire wolves feature in the show and are held at high importance, so the name “seemed right.”
De-extinction is done by genome editing technology that creates hybrids between living and extinct organisms. So these puppies are not really dire wolves, but more of a cross between them and an everyday dog.
Scientists insert edited DNA from the extinct species of wolves into the nucleus of a reproducing cell. They use this technique to resurrect more species, including those whose remains are not well-preserved.
“I think they are more like modified gray wolves rather than dire wolves or dogs,” biology teacher Matthew Ewald said.
By editing the DNA of existing gray wolf cells to include some traits from long-extinct dire wolves (like their white hair and large size) and using them to create viable embryos with cloning technology, Colossal claims it has created “the world’s first successfully de-extinct animal.”
There have been efforts previously made to bring back extinct animals but they have been unsuccessful, this is the first that has worked and produced a very close copy to the goal.
These wolves were brought back as an experimental test to see if we could preserve endangered animals. Since the test was a success, this same experiment will be done on other animals that are endangered, such as gray wolves, giant pandas, sea lions, and more.
The Dire wolf puppies were brought back as a sole purpose of experimenting for the benefit of other animals, but the public has fallen in love with the white puppies.
“I think the puppies are really cute, but it’s kinda weird that they were brought back after that long,” Ava Perry (9) said.
