The only de-extinction company in the world announced today that 12,500 years after it last roamed the earth, the dire wolf is no longer extinct.
Like a plot mashup of Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones, John Hammond meets Jon Snow, scientists at Colossal Biosciences claims to have pulled off the world’s first de-extinction event. It’s brought back the dire wolf. The three pups include two males, Remus and Romulus, and a female called Khaleesi. The species made its reentry back into the timeline on October 1, 2024 with the birth of the males, followed by the female pup roughly two months later.
“I could not be more proud of the team,” said CEO of Colossal Ben Lamm. “This massive milestone is the first of many coming examples demonstrating that our end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works. Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies. It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”
Colossal Biosciences
Life finds a way
The scientists at Colossal reportedly extracted DNA from two dire wolf fossils and compared the assembled genomes to that of other canid relatives. Once they identified differences, the scientists spliced together a functional genome with 20 precision edits – 15 of which were extinct gene variants not seen since the days of woolly mammoths over 12,000 years ago. The previous record for unique germline edits was eight, also held by Colossal. They then created clones by taking the nucleus from a somatic cell and put in into an empty donor egg cell (kind of like Dolly the Sheep) before doing an embryo transfer and “managed interspecies surrogacy,” which were domestic dogs, according to Time Magazine, who visited the animals.
No Longer Extinct? Colossal Biosciences’ Dire Wolf Project
Speaking of woolly, Colossal had made recent headlines for “inventing” the woolly mouse – a proof of concept for multiplexed genome engineering to activate mammoth-like traits (like thick fur and fat storage) in mice – setting that eight-edit-record in the process – by mimicking mammoth genomes dating back as far as 1.2 million years ago.
Dire wolves aside for a moment, Colossal Biosciences wasn’t content with simply bringing a long-lost species back to life. Using a less-invasive blood cloning method the company pioneered, it also cloned four critically endangered red wolves. Traditional cloning methods (if you can call “cloning” traditional) require invasive tissue biopsies. Colossal’s approach uses endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) taken from a simple blood draw.
Colossal Biosciences
Much like InGen’s fictional park, the seven wolves all live together in a 2,000+ acre (8,000+ sq km) secure ecological preserve with 10-foot-tall (3-m), zoo-grade fencing at an undisclosed location with 10 full-time staff to care for and monitor the wolves, complete with live video feeds and drone tracking. The facility where the wolves live has been certified by the American Humane Society and registered with the USDA.
Dire wolf territory was predominantly in North America – especially in the Midwest and Southeast – from California (The La Brea Tar Pits has been a gold mine for dire wolf fossils) to Florida. Their remains have even been found as far south as Bolivia in South America, the animal preferring more temperate areas over the cold.
Colossal hasn’t just brought back an extinct predator. Colossal has created de-extinction. An end-to-end method of resuming a species that simply no longer exists. In the words of a famous “chaostician,” Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
What’s next? Colossal says the dodo, wooly mammoth, and thylacine are next on the to do list. What about a tiny triceratops? At this point, anything seems possible.
Source: Colossal Biosciences via Businesswire