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"Dire wolves"

The guys at the Colossal Biosciences claim to have resurrected extinct dire wolves. Colossal is a biotech company whose mission is to use genetic engineering to help with wild life conservation. Their projects are to bring extinct species back to life.

They have announced that they have brought back the extinct dire wolf species with their genetic engineering. But while these three puppies do represent the technological breakthrough, independent experts have said they are not actually dire wolves.

Dire wolf, mostly known for their fictional role in the series Game of Thrones is a real extinct species that lived in the Americas during the ice age. They were large wolf like canines. They're known from lots of fossils and even from some ancient DNA.

How they made these puppies were by analysing the DNA of a dire wolf, identifying some of the genes that make them distinctive, took some modern day gray wolf embryos and made manual edits to 14 genes to make their genes more like the versions of the genes in the dire wolf. Then they implanted those embryos to surrogate dog parents which then gave birth to the "dire wolf" puppies through a C-section.

At least this is what's been explained to the press this research has not yet been published or peer reviewed. So it's still unknown to us what they actually did in details.

So what Colossal has really produced is a modified gray wolf that just has dire wolf characteristics like larger skulls and white fur. In theory the idea here is that the resurrected "dire wolves" could fit ecological roles that have been empty since their extinction. But exactly what traits do these "dire wolves" would have that make them better at doing this than the already loving wolves is questionable and hasn't really been talked about in any articles.

Colossal claims that these puppies have features in their appearance and even the sound they make of ancient dire wolves and are claiming in a video of these puppies howling that this is the first time these howls have been heard in 10,000 years. That does sound really exciting, but the problem is that we do not know what the ancient dire wolves looked or sounded like. We have absolutely no way of knowing if these howls are what the ancient dire wolves actually sounded like or if these are just weird sounds made by some hybrid puppies. Which again makes this claim that they have brought back a whole species from extinction feel a bit disingenuous.

This seems more like a sensation than science since the press around this story has felt a lot less like an announcement of new research for the promise that this would be the latest most advanced technology that is a step towards a future where we could restore damaged ecosystems and felt more like a new product to be sold.