Dire Wolf: the resurrection that is not quite what it seems
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Colossal Biosciences created three wolf pups with 20 gene edits to resemble dire wolves using ancient DNA and CRISPR technology.
The pups are genetically gray wolves with some dire wolf traits, sparking debate over whether they truly represent de-extinct dire wolves.
The project demonstrates major advances in ancient DNA extraction and gene editing but raises ethical and ecological questions about de-extinction.
The original dire wolf lineage diverged from gray wolves over 5 million years ago, complicating claims that these pups are authentic dire wolves.
The dire wolf pups live in a large, secure preserve but cannot be released into the wild due to the absence of their original ecosystem.
GLOSSARY
De-extinction
The process of creating an organism that resembles or is genetically similar to an extinct species using genetic technologies.
Dire wolf
An extinct species of large canid that lived in North America, genetically distinct from modern gray wolves.
CRISPR-Cas9
A gene editing technology used to make precise changes to DNA sequences in living cells.
Ancient DNA
Genetic material extracted from long-dead organisms, often degraded and challenging to sequence.
Gene edits
Specific targeted changes made to an organism's DNA to alter traits or characteristics.
Gray wolf
A living species of wolf used as the genetic base for the edited pups resembling dire wolves.
FAQ
What exactly did Colossal Biosciences achieve with the dire wolf project?
Colossal extracted ancient DNA from dire wolf fossils and used CRISPR to edit gray wolf genomes at 20 specific genes to produce pups with dire wolf traits. These pups are genetically gray wolves with some dire wolf characteristics, marking a significant advance in gene editing and ancient DNA technology.
Why is there controversy over calling the pups 'dire wolves'?
The controversy arises because the pups share 99.5% of their DNA with gray wolves and only have 20 gene edits out of about 20,000 genes. Additionally, dire wolves are believed to be a distinct lineage that diverged millions of years ago, making these edited animals genetically closer to gray wolves than true dire wolves.
What are the ecological implications of reintroducing these edited wolves?
The original ecosystems and prey species that dire wolves depended on have been extinct for thousands of years, so these pups cannot be released into the wild safely. Their current habitat is a large, secure preserve, but restoring their ecological role is not feasible with present conditions.
How does this project advance the field of ancient DNA and gene editing?
The project demonstrates the ability to extract usable DNA from 72,000-year-old fossils and perform multiple precise germline edits in a vertebrate species. It surpasses previous records for gene edits in such projects and shows that complex traits can be engineered in living animals using ancient genetic information.
What ethical or scientific debates does this project raise?
The project raises questions about the purpose and consequences of de-extinction, including resource allocation away from conserving existing endangered species, the definition of species identity, and the ecological impacts of introducing genetically engineered animals into modern environments.
EDITORIAL NOTE
This piece is part of The Present Minds — essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
A digital sanctuary for the overstimulated. Clarity. Depth. Silence.
Dire wolf is no longer extinct. That sentence is both true and, depending on who you ask, deeply misleading.
On April 7, 2025, Colossal Biosciences announced that three wolf pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi were alive and growing in a secret 2,000-acre preserve somewhere in the United States. The company called them the world’s first de-extincted animals. The story broke through one of the most chaotic news weeks of the year and made global headlines anyway. The images were extraordinary: snow-white wolf pups, huge already at five months, howling at six weeks old.
The internet lost its mind. Scientists lost their patience. And somewhere in between, something genuinely remarkable got buried under the argument about what to call it.
What Colossal Actually Did
The starting point was two dire wolf fossils: a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from a skull fragment found in American Falls, Idaho.
From those fragments, Colossal’s scientists extracted ancient DNA and assembled two high-quality dire wolf genomes, covering up to 91 percent of the total genetic sequence. They compared those genomes to living canids, including gray wolves, jackals and foxes, to identify the genetic variants responsible for traits unique to dire wolves: the heavier build, the wider head, the thicker coat, the pale colouration, the stronger jaw.
Then they edited gray wolf cells.
Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, the team made 20 targeted edits across 14 genes in gray wolf cells taken from the blood of captive wolves. The edited cell nuclei were transferred into dog eggs whose own nuclei had been removed. Those embryos were implanted into surrogate domestic hounds selected for size and health. Eight transfers were attempted with an average of 45 embryos each. Two male pups were born on October 1, 2024. A female pup followed on January 30, 2025. No miscarriages or stillbirths.
The gray wolf and the dire wolf share 99.5 percent of their DNA. What Colossal changed represents 20 edits across 14 genes, out of approximately 20,000 total genes. The animals are, by any strict genetic definition, gray wolves with a handful of dire wolf traits.
Colossal’s own chief scientist Beth Shapiro put it plainly when pressed: they are gray wolves with 20 edits that are cloned. This was framed as something the company had said from the beginning, though the marketing materials used the phrase world’s first de-extincted animal prominently and repeatedly.
Geneticist Elinor Karlsson, who sits on Colossal’s own advisory board, asked Shapiro directly: why are you calling this a dire wolf when it’s a gray wolf with seventeen or eighteen changes in its DNA? The question was not resolved before publication.
Science writer Carl Zimmer of the New York Times was characteristically precise: it’s a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits and some dire wolf traits. University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill was less diplomatic. Jeremy Austin, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, said it was not a dire wolf under any definition of a species ever.
The deepest problem is evolutionary. A 2021 study published in Nature, co-authored by Beth Shapiro herself, found that dire wolves may not even be wolves. They appear to belong to a distinct North American lineage of canids that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. They were more closely related to African jackals than to the animal whose genome was used as the base for Romulus and Remus. One researcher described what a dire wolf actually looked like as a giant reddish coyote.
Colossal’s newer research appears to contradict these findings. That newer research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
But underneath the argument is something that genuinely deserves attention.
Colossal extracted usable genetic information from a 72,000-year-old bone fragment. Seventy-two thousand years. The last Neanderthals were alive when that animal died. The techniques that made this possible represent a genuine frontier in ancient DNA science that did not exist a decade ago.
The company made 20 precise germline edits in a vertebrate animal, surpassing their own previous record of 8 edits in the woolly mouse project. The embryology worked. Three large canids were born healthy to domestic dog surrogates with no complications, at a scale that would have been considered impossible five years ago.
Love Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University and an adviser to Colossal, put it carefully: there is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question. It carries dire wolf genes, and these genes make it look more like a dire wolf than anything we have seen in the last 13,000 years. And that is very cool.
Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi at Six Months
By six months old, Romulus and Remus measured nearly 1.2 metres in length and weighed 36 kilograms each. They are projected to reach 1.8 metres and 68 kilograms at full maturity, significantly larger than a standard gray wolf.
They are housed in a 2,000-acre ecological preserve surrounded by 10-foot fencing at an undisclosed location. They began howling at two weeks old. They began stalking, hunting leaves or anything that moved, very early on.
Khaleesi, the female born three months after the males, is named after the Game of Thrones character. The dire wolf was the inspiration for the direwolves in Game of Thrones. The naming is on the nose in a way that does not feel accidental.
Three animals live in a large enclosure doing what wolves do, watched by cameras, visited by scientists, unable to roam the thousand-square-mile territory that wild wolf packs require.
Whether their lives will extend beyond the preserve, whether a partner species will be bred, whether the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s interest in hosting a controlled wild population on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota will come to anything, remains genuinely open.
The Jurassic Park question is not whether de-extinction is possible. Colossal has demonstrated that a version of it is. The question is whether it is the right use of the extraordinary tools now available to biology.
The habitats the dire wolf once roamed no longer exist. The megafauna it hunted, mammoths, giant ground sloths, ancient bison, are gone. Romulus and Remus cannot be released into an ecosystem that would support what they are, because that ecosystem has not existed for 10,000 years.
Ronald Sandler, professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, described it as follows: there is real technological innovation here. The question of what the innovation is actually for is separate, and harder.
The Howl Worth Hearing
Colossal posted a video on the day of their announcement. The caption read: sound on. You are hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years.
The howl was real. The animal producing it was real. Whether the animal is a dire wolf depends entirely on how you define the word.
What is not in dispute is what the howl represents: a window into what was possible with ancient DNA, CRISPR and the specific ambition of a company with a $10 billion valuation and a taste for naming things after Game of Thrones characters.
Science moved. The argument about what it means is still in progress.
Somewhere in a secret enclosure in the United States, three white wolves are very large, very healthy, and entirely unaware of the controversy they have caused.
Colossal Biosciences created three wolf pups with 20 gene edits to resemble dire wolves using ancient DNA and CRISPR technology.
The pups are genetically gray wolves with some dire wolf traits, sparking debate over whether they truly represent de-extinct dire wolves.
The project demonstrates major advances in ancient DNA extraction and gene editing but raises ethical and ecological questions about de-extinction.
The original dire wolf lineage diverged from gray wolves over 5 million years ago, complicating claims that these pups are authentic dire wolves.
The dire wolf pups live in a large, secure preserve but cannot be released into the wild due to the absence of their original ecosystem.
Glossary
De-extinction
The process of creating an organism that resembles or is genetically similar to an extinct species using genetic technologies.
Dire wolf
An extinct species of large canid that lived in North America, genetically distinct from modern gray wolves.
CRISPR-Cas9
A gene editing technology used to make precise changes to DNA sequences in living cells.
Ancient DNA
Genetic material extracted from long-dead organisms, often degraded and challenging to sequence.
Gene edits
Specific targeted changes made to an organism's DNA to alter traits or characteristics.
Gray wolf
A living species of wolf used as the genetic base for the edited pups resembling dire wolves.
FAQ
What exactly did Colossal Biosciences achieve with the dire wolf project?
Colossal extracted ancient DNA from dire wolf fossils and used CRISPR to edit gray wolf genomes at 20 specific genes to produce pups with dire wolf traits. These pups are genetically gray wolves with some dire wolf characteristics, marking a significant advance in gene editing and ancient DNA technology.
Why is there controversy over calling the pups 'dire wolves'?
The controversy arises because the pups share 99.5% of their DNA with gray wolves and only have 20 gene edits out of about 20,000 genes. Additionally, dire wolves are believed to be a distinct lineage that diverged millions of years ago, making these edited animals genetically closer to gray wolves than true dire wolves.
What are the ecological implications of reintroducing these edited wolves?
The original ecosystems and prey species that dire wolves depended on have been extinct for thousands of years, so these pups cannot be released into the wild safely. Their current habitat is a large, secure preserve, but restoring their ecological role is not feasible with present conditions.
How does this project advance the field of ancient DNA and gene editing?
The project demonstrates the ability to extract usable DNA from 72,000-year-old fossils and perform multiple precise germline edits in a vertebrate species. It surpasses previous records for gene edits in such projects and shows that complex traits can be engineered in living animals using ancient genetic information.
What ethical or scientific debates does this project raise?
The project raises questions about the purpose and consequences of de-extinction, including resource allocation away from conserving existing endangered species, the definition of species identity, and the ecological impacts of introducing genetically engineered animals into modern environments.
Editorial Note
This piece is part of The Present Minds, essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
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