Has the Dire Wolf really returned? Colossal scientist finally tells the truth

Time of India

24-05-2025

Image credits: Instagram/dinaank.official
It seems filters are not just limited to social media anymore. They can be created in organisms in real life to make them resemble a more beautiful yet extinct version of them.
Colossal Biosciences, an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company announced on April 7, 2025, the birth of "dire wolf" pups which went extinct over 10,000 years ago.
The company explicitly announced the "rebirth of the once extinct dire wolf" a species that was mostly unknown, unheard of and unseen by humans, thus getting them excited about the possibility of seeing an animal from the past alive in the present.
But has the dire wolf really returned? Read on to find out what the chief scientist at Colossal has to say.
Who are Dire wolves?
Dire Wolf, scientifically known as Aenocyon dirus are canines that existed during the Pleistocene Epoch, around 2.6 million to 11700 years ago.
According to Britannica.com, the species was spread throughout North America and parts of western South America. Its skeletal remains have been found in Florida, the Mississippi River valley, Valley of Mexico, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela.
These wolves that had gone extinct thousands of years ago were said to have been made 'de-extinct' by Colossal who announced the birth of three dire wolf pups named Romulus, Remulus and Khaleesi.
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When the company announced the same, it was believed by people across the globe that a new success had been achieved in biotechnology and humans had once again been able to achieve a task that was thought to be impossible.
However, there were many researchers who stated that the claim made by Colossal of reviving an extinct species was false and that they were just genetically modified gray wolves. Now, Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro has finally revealed the true identity of these pups.
Has the Dire Wolf truly returned?
Image credits: Instagram/kitharringtonig
In a new interview with New Scientist, Shapiro confirmed that the "dire wolves" created by the company are indeed just gray wolves with 20 modified genes. "It's not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned," said Shapiro.
"And we've said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they're calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry," she added.
"In our press release, we stated we made 20 gene edits to grey wolf cells," a spokesperson for the company said to Live Sciences. "Grey wolves are the closest living relative to the dire wolves, as we showed in our paper. With those edits, we have brought back the dire wolf…"
"We have also said that species are ultimately a human construct and that other scientists have a right to disagree and call them whatever they want to call them.
Khaleesi, Romulus and Remus are the first dire wolves to walk the Earth in 12,000 years. They are doing amazingly well and are a testament to what we can achieve as we continue on our goal of bringing back the dodo, thylacine, and woolly mammoth, among other species.
"
The contention between Colossal and other scientists lies in different definitions of a species. Shapiro previously shared that Colossal is using the "morphological species concept" which defines a species on the basis of its morphology or appearance.
However, most scientists follow the "biological species concept" which defines a species on their capability of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.
How did Colossal create the new "dire wolf"?
In order to create the new dire wolves, Colossal scientists found fossils of the real dire wolves, their teeth and skulls that had been buried for 13,000 to 72,000 years. These bones still had tiny fragments of DNA that they used to build the creatures.
Next, they required a closest living relative of the dire wolves to use as a template.
This is where the gray wolves entered the situation as their closest living cousins. They compared the DNA of both to figure out the differences which revealed that the dire wolves were larger, had a more massive skull, smaller brain and larger teeth than the modern day gray wolves.
Then, the scientists embarked on the process of gene editing through the tool CRISPR which essentially helped them change certain parts of the gray wolf's DNA and insert in the place, aspects of the dire wolf DNA.
In total, they made about 20 edits across 14 genes. This means that out of the 20,000 genes they just changed 14 to make the wolves morphologically look like dire wolves but the rest of them are still gray wolves.
To produce the dire wolves, they took an empty egg cell from a big dog, removed its own DNA and inserted the edited gray wolf DNA. This egg was planted into a surrogate large domestic dog who carried them and gave them birth.
Thus, while Colossal's dire wolves are truly a master of science and technology and have become a symbol of achieving the unimaginable, they are not really dire wolves but just modified gray wolves.