'Return' of dire wolf is an impressive feat of genetic engineering, not a reversal of extinction

Dallas-based biotech company Colossal has announced the birth of three pups bearing the DNA signatures of dire wolves, an iconic predator last seen roaming North America over 10,000 years ago.

- by Timothy Hearn Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

With their names Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, these pups are playing to the cultural imagination, blending ancient mythology with fantasy fiction. Romulus and Remus nod to the legendary founders of Rome, raised by a wolf, while Khaleesi evokes the dire wolves of Game of Thrones.

It's a resurrection story made for the headlines, but beneath the dramatic narrative lies a more nuanced and more scientifically grounded - story. The birth of these pups is not the return of an extinct species. Instead, it's a demonstration of how far we've come in the toolkit of synthetic biology (a field that involves redesigning systems found in nature), and a reminder of how far we still are from truly reversing extinction.

Colossal's work follows in the footsteps of its other high-profile project: the effort to “resurrect” the woolly mammoth. As discussed in a previous Conversation article, that project began with mice carrying mammoth gene traits early evidence that gene editing could one day produce cold-resistant elephants with mammoth-like characteristics. The dire wolf project is a similar exercise in technological potential, not biological resurrection.

So what exactly happened in the lab? Scientists at Colossal extracted ancient DNA from fossilised dire wolf remains, including a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone. From these samples, they sequenced the genome (the full complement of DNA in cells) and compared it with that of the modern gray wolf.