Crying Wolf: Time Capsules Needed, Not Time Machines

HE most exotic animal seen since Herodotus wrote of India's gold-digging ants used to be Devil, the 'Bengal mountain wolf' of the Lee Falk universe. Phantom often corrected ignorant people about his companion's status: "Not a dog, a wolf." Now, Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences of the US has brought an even more exotic wolf into the world.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

HE most exotic animal seen since Herodotus wrote of India's gold-digging ants used to be Devil, the 'Bengal mountain wolf' of the Lee Falk universe. Phantom often corrected ignorant people about his companion's status: "Not a dog, a wolf." Now, Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences of the US has brought an even more exotic wolf into the world. En route to its major project, the 'de-extinction' of the woolly mammoth, the company has de-extincted the dire wolf, a long-lost North American cousin of the grey wolf.

The nomenclature is significant: the company does not claim to have resurrected the dire wolf. By editing the modern grey wolf DNA, it has created a being which physically resembles the lost species which, until now, had survived only in the Game of Thrones universe. The dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, has not been reborn. Instead, the grey wolf, Canis lupus, has been coaxed into exhibiting the phenotypic characteristics of the extinct wolf. The genetic paths of the two species forked 300,000 years ago, and the archaic species died out about 10,000 years ago.

So, this is just another live demo of the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, not a scientific breakthrough as advertised. But like other biological mashups from before gene editing was possible, it is a headline-grabber. The liger, a hybrid of a lion and a tiger, has been fascinating the public from early 19th-century India. Zonkeys, crosses between a zebra and a donkey, have also been reported for as long. Charles Darwin recorded the existence of other zebroids.