Why resurrect the dire wolf when existing animals are facing extinction?

It’s not as sensational as recreating long-dead species, but conserving modern-day fauna is far more pressing

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The parable of the Mars mission: we'd rather spend trillions sending ourselves to a yet unlivable planet than look after the one we have. And swiftly on its heels, the parable of the dire wolf. We'd rather resurrect a 12,500-year-old species from the dead than save our existing wild animals. Of course we would. Recycling is boring; doing the very thing 90s science fiction movies warned us not to do is fun.

We are not quite on the verge of bringing back ancient species. But last week the PR campaign for doing so began in earnest. Colossal Biosciences - a company known for trying to revive the dodo, the mammoth and the thylacine — has unveiled three large adorable white puppies, claiming it has created “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”: the dire wolf, made famous by Game of Thrones. It invited author George RR Martin to look; he duly burst into tears.

Scientists have been quick to point out that the company hasn't done anything of the sort: it has instead created a new animal altogether — a larger, whiter, more muscly wolf. To do so, researchers made edits to the grey wolf genome, and then implanted the resulting embryos in large dogs, extracting them by caesarean section. The puppies look like dire wolves, but what gives the project away is the fact that this is down to just 20 gene edits made on a genome of billions of bases - which makes them closer to the grey wolf than anything else.