No Longer Extinct_ Colossal Biosciences' Dire Wolf Project

The howl of a dire wolf hasn't been heard on planet Earth for more than 10,000 years. That's because the species is extinct, or was. Colossal Biosciences is a Dallas-based company that's using genetic engineering to de-extinct long-gone species. And this is the first time colossal dire wolf pups, who are now six months old, have been seen by the public. Hey Ben, it's Jeff Kluger from Time Magazine. A pleasure to meet you. Help me a little bit about what the goal is for de-extincting and rewilding, ultimately. Why are you doing this work? It became abundantly clear that we need new tools and technologies for conservation. And so we thought this was a really cool way that we could create value, create impact, inspire people, and then also hopefully thoughtfully rewild some of these species, which apparently will also have ecological benefits to these different potential ecosystems. To try and do that, Colossal needed to understand dire wolves at a genetic level. The company has documented the process from the beginning and shared this footage with Time for a So can you tell me a little bit about what went into engineering the dire wolf? We extracted DNA from two fossils that we knew from previous work had some amount of preserved ancient DNA. One was a 13,000-year-old bone and the other was a 72,000-year-old bone, an inner ear bone. We were able to generate two genomes, two dire wolf genome sequences from that, which we then compared to all the other wolves for which there's already been data generated. And when we do that, we want to figure out where it is that these two dire wolves are similar to each other, but different from the other wolves that are out there. And so we come up with this list of genes where they're distinct. Now, our goal in the dire wolf project, just like with all de-extinction projects, is to re-engineer the core traits, the core characteristics that made these extinct species unique and able to fill whatever role that they filled in their ecosystems when they were still alive. Using this knowledge, Colossal then made 20 modifications to 14 genes in the DNA of common gray wolf cells. These relatively few tweaks to the genetic code produced some big differences. The dire wolf's white coat, large size, characteristic vocalizations like that howling you heard at the beginning of the story, and more. That DNA was transferred to denucleated egg cells, meaning cells without their own genetic material, and then developed into embryos and were then implanted in the wombs of surrogate mothers, who were hound-mix dogs. We didn't know how big these embryos would grow and wanted to make sure that the surrogate was healthy, so we picked large dogs. Romulus and Remus, named after the Roman mythological twin brothers who were raised by a wolf, were born on October 1, 2024. And in January, they were joined by a younger sister that the Colossal team named Khaleesi. Each wolf is on track to grow to as large as six feet long and 150 pounds. Colossal isn't planning to reintroduce them to the wild. Instead, the three dire wolves will live out their lives on a fenced 2,000 acre preserve. Colossal does not want to disclose this location in order to protect the animals. I think these are the luckiest animals ever. They will live their entire life on this protected ecological reserve, where they have all sorts of space, and they have natural denning environment, and they have an inclement weather hut that they can go and hide out in if they need to. They have 24-hour veterinary care. Dire wolves aren't the only species on Colossal's de-extinction agenda. An American company says it has genetically engineered mice so that they have developed some traits like mammoths. A small but potentially important step in a quest to eventually bring back the prehistoric woolly mammoth. They hope to de-extinct the woolly mammoth as early as 2028. The company is also hoping to bring back the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. If some of this genetic tinkering feels familiar, it's because Hollywood has been here first. And, spoiler alert, we all know that didn't end well. So naturally, bioethicists have some concerns. When you're playing with nature, nature usually wins. Nature is much more complicated than the ability of our brains to understand it. Genes do many things. There may be a lot of unintended consequences. Let's say we alter a gene to make extra hair or to make it burn metabolism more, burn fat more. Those genes may do other things in ways that we just don't even understand. So we may create animals that have lots of medical problems. If we start tinkering with genes, we may create a super mouse, a super rat that kills all the other animals around. But the team at Colossal says their mission to restore extinct species is also about stopping the disappearance of endangered ones today, as experts predict Earth will lose 30 percent of its genetic diversity by 2050. Colossal has used techniques learned from the direwolf project to clone four red wolves, a small but important step in fortifying that endangered species. The four new wolves could help inject fresh DNA into the red wolf gene pool, which currently suffers from a so-called genetic bottleneck, the result of too few individuals carrying too little genetic variety to keep the species healthy. Yes, it would be really amazing to see a mammoth. It would be great for the habitats of Tasmania to have a keystone predator reintroduced into that ecosystem. But the tools that we're developing on the path to these species have immediate application to species that are not yet extinct, a future that is both biodiverse and filled with people. We should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we've done to the world already. There's a huge need to help prevent animals from becoming endangered and going extinct. We need to spend more money on conservation. Particularly now, there's a lot of threats that lands that we have as national parks and as preserves are going to be used for drilling oil, for instance. So there's a lot of habitats where species now live that are going to be under threat. And there's not enough money to help with conservation efforts.