"Dire wolves" are now a real thing

DavidBrown

DavidBrown

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
A biotech company has produced dire wolf-ish canids using dire wolf DNA. There are three individuals, all held at an undisclosed location in a large compound.

They are not true dire wolves, but the closest thing that has been alive for 10,000 years apparently.

So what is the first zoo that is going to have a "dire wolf" exhibit?


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/...e_code=1.904.I_Mq.-MNZw8qNGCtQ&smid=url-share
 
Fallax said:
Calling these dire wolves while they just look like stockier Arctic wolves is really stretching it.
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It is more than just looks:
The animals do carry 20 dire-wolf genes, which might reveal something about the biology of the extinct species. But Dr. Boyko speculated that many other genes also helped set them apart from other wolves. “We don’t know what that number is,” he said. “It could be 20, or it could be 2,000.”
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So they are more like a kind of hybrid, but they are not just big grey wolves.
 
For anyone wondering how, quoting ‘The Science Behind the Return of the Dire Wolf’, with added information in brackets:

“Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences (to tradition cloning). Scientists first analysed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull (from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull). Comparing those genomes to that of the grey wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative (which share 99.5% of their DNA with, despite the last time grey wolves and dire wolves sharing a common ancestor being about 5.7 million years ago)—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalisations, especially howling and whining.

Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels, from the bloodstreams of living grey wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in grey wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited grey wolf genome.

Once this was finished, the edited nuclei were next extracted from the cells and inserted into denucleated grey wolf ova. The ova were left to grow into embryos and 45 were transferred into the wombs of two domestic hound mixes. One embryo in each surrogate mother took hold, and after 65 days of gestation, Rolulus and Remus (the six-month-old males). A few months later, the procedure was repeated with a third surrogate who ultimately gave birth to Khaleesi (the two-month-old female). All three births were conducted by scheduled cesarean section to minimize the chances of injury during delivery. No surrogate dogs had a miscarriage or stillbirth during the process.”

EDIT: Just to clarify, this is the phenotype of a dire wolf, although truly the pups are grey wolves with seventeen or eighteen changes in their DNA.
 
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Dr. Loxodonta said:
At the time of writing, Romulus and Remus apparently live together in a secure 2,000 acre ecological preserve called Zone Alpha, in an undisclosed location somewhere in the northern United States. I’m unsure if the female pup is also held there?
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Since the female is about 4 months younger they may keep her at another facility until she is older, but your observation is good - they don't say where she is.
 
Just to add a pinch of salt to what's been claimed by the company:

Dire wolves are the basal group within the Canini, which includes all of Canis, plus Cuon, Lupulella and Lycaon. They are estimated to have diverged from the rest of the Canini (including what eventually became Grey wolves) about 5.7 million years ago.

This is a reasonably comparable timeframe to that of the divergence between Pan and Homo. Rather nicely, the grey wolf genome is very similarly sized to that of a human too. As an illustration for how ridiculous and potentially dangerous the claims they're making are, there are about 20,400 protein coding genes in a human, and just under 19,000 in a chimp. On top of there being a gulf of about 1,500 genes to make up, only 30% of these genes are actually identical in coding sequence between the two. This means that genetically modifying one species to give the other would take mutations/edits in well over 14,000 genes, a number which rather conveniently echoes the figure of 14 genes altered in the article, just a few orders of magnitude off.

If that isn't enough, they'd have to make new genes from scratch and apply entire gene deletions to the grey wolf genome as suggested by the gulf in genes between Pan and Homo. Not even mentioning the volume of non-coding DNA this analysis ignores. Once they come close to the thousands of genes that will inevitably be required to be altered to attempt such an endeavour in good faith, other, more complex, factors like behaviour, metabolism and vocalisation can be discussed. In the meantime the phrasing on both their own press releases and the articles describing it are disingenuous at best.
 
This makes me really angry, honestly. Their claims that these animals are Dire Wolves are ridiculous. They changed a total of 20 genes, only 15 of which are actually known to correspond to surviving Dire Wolf genetic material. Gray Wolves and Dire Wolves aren't even that closely related to begin with. These animals are just edited Gray Wolves, and claiming anything else is disgusting misinformation.
 
amur leopard said:
Once they come close to the thousands of genes that will inevitably be required to be altered to attempt such an endeavour in good faith, other, more complex, factors like behaviour, metabolism and vocalisation can be discussed. In the meantime the phrasing on both their own press releases and the articles describing it are disingenuous at best.
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Yeah, exactly. This is, roughly speaking, like if they took a modern lion or cougar genome, edited it to give the animal elongated canines, and then claimed the result was a Smilodon. What they're creating is more akin to a GMO/hybrid species.

I looked into Colossal when that story about the "woolly mice" broke a few months ago, and after finding more than a few shady investors backing the company, I've become increasingly skeptical of their projects.

Frankly, I don't think genuine de-extinction for prehistoric megafauna is either practical or even all that desirable (is the goal to build a real life Jurassic Park?). If de-extinction ever becomes more than a scam or pipedream, it should strictly be used for species that have gone extinct within the last few centuries, that have a chance at survival, and that would not drastically upend modern ecosystems. Possible candidates would be the baiji, Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, sea mink, thylacine, Chinese paddlefish, and perhaps something more challenging like Steller's sea cow. But at a crucial juncture like this, I think it's necessary to focus on saving the many endangered species that are still around.
 
Even though the dire wolf sounds enticing (and not probable in the slightest), what I'm more focused on is the company's attempt at bringing in new genes into the red wolf population through the "Ghost Wolf". To quote the Times article;

Recently, Bridgett vonHoldt, a Colossal scientific adviser and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, an associate professor of wildlife science and conservation at Michigan Tech, discovered populations of canids along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas whose DNA included both coyote genes and red wolf ghost alleles. The four red wolves the Colossal scientists created used that natural genetic reservoir to produce what they call the first Ghost Wolf, with an eye to eventually fortifying the red wolf species with more such young carrying a variety of genes.
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The article then goes on to state that the cloned wolves are living at the same site as the "dire" wolves.

The Return of the Dire Wolf
 
IMO, referring to these as dire wolves is incredibly disingenuous. First, there was no actual Aenocyon DNA added to their genomes (which I think should rule out any claim that these are anywhere close to being proper dire wolves), and they only modified a small handful of genes to get a desired phenotype. Second, modifying the genome to give the wolves a white coat color feels a bit more like they're trying to appeal to the public perception of what a dire wolf "should" look like (which has been heavily influenced by ASOIAF) than trying to accurately recreate the phenotype of an animal whose range largely included environments such as open lowlands.
 
This is even more embarrassing than I thought.
So these pups aren’t really dire wolves at all, then?

It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
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No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction

In other words, when that Chinese zoo painted two Chow Chows black and white to resemble giant pandas, it's completely valid to consider them giant pandas. Everyone can be right. This person - who studied evolutionary biology at Oxford University and currently serves as the chief scientific officer at Colossal - is cavalierly shrugging off cladistics, decades of DNA/RNA sequencing, and well-documented phenomena such as convergent evolution. While there is some inescapable subjectivity when it comes to taxonomy, especially when determining where to draw the line between species and subspecies, the argument she's making above is nowhere near that nuanced.

I don't know how anyone can still take this company seriously.
 
I was wondering when zoochat would catch on to the news, and am happy to see everyone here agrees how grotesquely inaccurate it is ;)

To sum up my thoughts, editing just 20 genomes (5 of which purely cosmetic!) cannot form a truly distinct animal, let alone one whose last common ancestor with wolves was almost six million years ago, for comparison, mammoths and asian elephants are about 44000 years apart. Considering the wolf pups don't seem to have many of the major characteristics of Aenocyon, be it fur colour, skull shape or foot size, and that they were made from the grey wolf, instead of more basal caninae like the jackals, its pretty easy to see through this overinflated story.

Until Colossal actually goes and makes an actual direwolf or other extinct animal instead of vague lookalikes, I cannot say if I can take this company seriously.
 
What an irony to make such a fuss and get such investment for genetically engineering a nonsense concept like this, while the question is open on starting hunting again for existing wolves which could send them to the brink of extinction.

If a fraction of the investment that goes into these Jurassic park like fantasy projects was spent on animals who were living and endangered, their environments and supporting the people who live with them the world could be a better place.

If this silly science with no point doesn’t illustrate how stupid, pointless and thoughtless some people are I don’t know what does.

They haven’t made a dire wolf at all and some of the quotes are such a lot of nonsense it’s ludicrous. They must see their investors coming. Edited to add their casual use of dogs to surrogate these pointless endeavours also makes me more angry than their casual approach to science.
 
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