Dire wolf or gene-edited gray wolf? Scientists shed light on the breakthrough

As the news of a biotechnology company bringing the famed dire wolf, popularized by George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the related television series Game of Thrones, back from extinction, has swept the world like wildfire, some scientists have spoken out.

Indeed, Colossal Bioscience has made headlines by stating it has ‘de-extincted’ the dire wolf, a massive animal that went extinct around 10,000 years ago, with the birth of two puppies in October 2024 and a third one in January 2025, according to a report by Scientific American published on April 8.

However, some scientists argue that what Colossal produced is not the dire wolf, but rather a gray wolf with the edited genome to give it some dire-wolf-like traits. One of them is Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, who said that:

“This is a designer dog. This is a genetically modified gray wolf.”

Not trying to bring back the ancient dire wolf?

That said, Colossal didn’t really claim to have reproduced the ancient dire wolf exactly. According to Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, the company’s team extracted and sequenced DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull.

Then, they edited 20 sites on 14 genes in the genome of the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus), introducing what they said were 15 extinct dire wolf variants, but without directly inserting any ancient dire wolf genes. Finally, they created embryos and implanted them in surrogate dogs.

Colossal targeted genes that affected phenotype, largely its appearance, editing those that determine fur color and thickness, body size, as well as ear, skull, and facial shape. But making something genetically identical to an ancient dire wolf through gene editing “is not really possible,” as Shapiro said.

“But it’s also not the goal. (…) We want to create functional versions of extinct species. We don’t have to have something that is 100 percent genetically identical.”

Regardless, Gill believes that this doesn’t make the puppies dire wolves because “I have more than 14 Neanderthal genes in me, and we wouldn’t call me a Neanderthal.” Still, she opines “There is cool science here, I just wish it wasn’t getting lost in hype.”

In her words, they “don’t have any traits that would allow us to understand the dire wolf any better than we did yesterday,” and understanding ice age organisms isn’t just a matter of knowing what they looked like or what they ate, but also what they did in their ancient ecosystems.

Implications of the breakthrough

At best, she views this as an “incremental step” towards de-extinction, and even if we managed to clone a dire wolf entirely identical to the extinct one, then it would raise an essential question of “What are we going to do with it?” as there are no plans to breed the wolves as of yet, and reintroducing them to the landscape would be nearly impossible.

Still, Colossal’s breakthrough could have a meaningful application in preserving the endangered red wolf that went extinct in the wild in 1980 because of hunting and habitat loss and was eventually reintroduced using a captive breeding program, and which has a limited gene pool.

In Shapiro’s view, her company’s gene-editing technique could help diversify the red wolf gene pool, with Colossal’s chief animal officer Matt James chiming in that it means “It’s actually using technology to prevent species from going extinct.”

All things considered, whether a de-extinct dire wolf or ‘just’ gene-edited gray wolf, this is nonetheless a remarkable feat, and could have significant scientific and genealogical implications, especially in terms of animals at danger of going extinct, and the media attention certainly helps.