Cry wolf: dire resurrection or mammoth reversal of loss?

A company claims to have brought back the dire wolf, extinct for 10,000 years. Has it, and why?

- By Ed Stoddard

As Easter loomed, another resurrection story was getting a lot of play. The dire wolf, a hulking canid that roamed the Americas until it went extinct 10,000 years ago, had been raised from the dead, according to Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, a biotech company dedicated to “de-extinction”.

But are the three pups — Romulus, Remus and their sister Khaleesi — really dire wolves? And if so, why is that important?

Has it been resurrected?

This question really stirred a hornet’s nest. The company said it had “extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from two dire wolf fossils” and then did “multiplex gene editing to a donor genome from their closest living relative, the grey wolf”.

But some experts are crying (dire) wolf.

"On their social media platforms, Colossal used the words ‘resurrected’, ‘reborn’, ‘brought back to life using ancient DNA’. This is extremely misleading sensationalism. They are not dire wolves; there is not a fragment of actual dire wolf DNA in them,” Sandra Lai, a senior scientist at Oxford University’s WildCRU research unit, told Daily Maverick.

“What was produced is a genetically modified grey wolf that superficially looks like what the extinct ‘dire wolf’ would have supposedly looked like. They compared the grey wolf genome and the parts of dire wolf genome they had obtained, identified gene variants specific for the dire wolf DNA and edited grey wolf genes to match those sequences to recreate some physical traits of dire wolves.”

This echoes what other experts have said. Some scientists have described the animals as a “hybrid” - in other words, like a mule, which is a cross between a horse and a donkey.