#de-extinction

Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.

Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.

When Australian scientists almost brought back the extinct gastric brooding frog

There was a moment in 2008 when Michael Mahony realised the ambitious project he'd signed up for years earlier might actually work. Looking under a microscope, a few tiny brown cells had begun to split, and when he first saw them, he let out an excited gasp. "Two or three out of the 50 started to divide," the University of Newcastle frog biologist says. The cells contained the DNA of a frog that had been extinct for decades, and it seemed the genetic information was starting to awaken.

The project was trying to do the impossible: de-extinct an animal. Even the name the research team chose — Project Lazarus — showed how far-fetched this whole scientific endeavour was. In the biblical story, Lazarus was a dead man that Jesus brought back to life. Unlike Lazarus, who had been entombed for just four days, the team was trying to bring back a frog that had been dead (and stuffed in a freezer) for decades. But, at least for a brief moment, they thought they'd made a genetic miracle happen...

Welcome to Direwolf Day. I’ve been holding my tongue for months now, sworn to silence yet dying to tell the world. Pardon my shouting, but… THE DIREWOLF IS BACK. Extinct for more than ten thousand years, but extinct no longer, thanks to Ben Lamm, George Church, Beth Shapiro, and the rest of their team of mad scientists at Colossal, the world leader in the science of “de-extinction.” I met them all in February, in… well, that would be telling. And I met Romulus and Remus too. Here’s me and Romulus. (Or maybe Remus. They’re twins, and hard to tell apart.

Sometimes, new data raises more questions than it answers.

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🧬 MIRROR LIFE — YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT

While you're online rage-tweeting about a pop star's body count or foaming at the mouth over whether pineapple belongs on pizza, some guy in a lab coat with social skills of a toaster just made a new species.

Yes. A. New. Fucking. Species.

Not discovered. Made. From scratch. And he did it because he could.

🧠 SCIENCE HAS BECOME A WISH FULFILLMENT FANFIC WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO THINK CONSEQUENCES ARE OPTIONAL.

Let’s take a short stroll through some actual, verifiable, scientific OH-FUCK moments that didn’t make the front page because a billionaire got divorced:

📍2010 — Scientists revived ancient bacteria from 30,000-year-old permafrost. It worked. It was hungry. And they laughed. Said, “isn’t it cute?”

You woke up that day thinking about bagels. They woke up thinking,

“Let’s resurrect something the Ice Age tried to kill.”

📍2016 — CRISPR goes live. The “copy-paste” function for DNA. Everyone cheers.

Until China used it on human embryos. And until they didn’t tell us what else they cut.

Because the minute you can edit life like it's a Google Doc is the minute some intern becomes God.

And God didn’t require peer review.

📍2018 — They create synthetic DNA with six base pairs instead of four. That means life that can’t even be read by nature. DNA that Earth itself can’t interpret.

Do you understand?

They made a language life doesn’t speak. And they gave it a body.

📍2021 — Xenobots. A living, programmable organism made from frog cells. It moves. It remembers. It replicates. It’s not animal. It’s not machine. It’s something else.

And it’s already outpacing its own designers.

🐸 XENOBOTS DESIGNED THEMSELVES A FEW WEEKS LATER. Let me say that again: They figured out how to make more of themselves. Without being taught.

How long until they don’t want to stop?

🔬 YOU THINK MAN’S HUBRIS ENDED WITH THE NUCLEAR BOMB?

We dropped the bomb. Twice. That wasn’t a deterrent. That was a product test.

You think Tuskegee was a fluke? They watched Black men die slowly from untreated syphilis and documented it like recipe notes.

You think gain-of-function research wasn’t going to go off like a grenade in a Wuhan lab?

What do you think is happening now that you’re not supposed to know yet?

📦 YOU ARE ONE NERD DECISION AWAY FROM AN APOCALYPSE WITH A BARCODE.

They’re not building bombs. They’re building organisms. That won’t come with warning sirens. That won’t need a plane or a missile.

They’ll breathe. They’ll breed. They’ll spread without fanfare.

Because you don’t see the apocalypse until it mutates into your bloodline.

🩸 WHAT YOU’RE NOT TOLD:

Some modified viruses now survive dry air, UV, and acid.

CRISPR is being used by private corporations with zero oversight.

Animal-human hybrids have already been grown in gestation for over a month before being terminated.

Some weren’t terminated. (Yeah. That part got buried in institutional white noise.)

😐 NOBODY PANICS BECAUSE IT’S TOO UNREAL TO BE REAL

You don’t protest what you think sounds like science fiction. You just blink. Scroll. Think about dinner.

Meanwhile…

A gene-edited mosquito was released in Florida. Not proposed. Not theorized. Released. To “test population control.” It bred.

Lab-grown meat from immortal cell lines is now being sold And nobody can explain how the cells are terminated.

🧬 YOU ARE LIVING IN A BIO-EXPERIMENT WHERE THE CONTROL GROUP IS HUMANITY.

Nobody signed consent. Nobody got a warning label.

You're still arguing over oat milk while mirror organisms — life made from alien geometry — are learning how to out-evolve us before we know they exist.

🐖 FUN FACT: China’s gene-edited pigs were engineered to feel less pain. Not for compassion. For easier slaughter.

They removed pain instead of removing the violence.

That's how scientists think.

💊 AND IF YOU THINK THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL

Go Google He Jiankui.

The Chinese scientist who edited twin girls to be immune to HIV. Did it in secret. Without consent. Now they're growing up with unknown edits.

You think that's the only one?

You think governments wouldn’t make designer soldiers if they could?

They already tried. (📄 See: DARPA. MKUltra. Project Artichoke.)

🌍 YOU THINK THIS PLANET’S NATURAL?

You were born into a beta test.

And they’re patching reality with every unregulated petri dish.

We created life forms that nature doesn’t recognize. And now?

Nature’s not responding.

It’s retreating.

🧠 YOU’RE NOT SCARED BECAUSE YOU’VE BEEN NUMBED

By Netflix, by debates about cartoon genitalia, by influencers performing trauma for engagement loops.

Meanwhile…

Earth is warming faster than any model accounted for.

Permafrost is leaking undiscovered viruses.

Gene drives are being tested on entire ecosystems.

And you’re asking which sandwich shop delivers after 9PM.

😐 “IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE MAKING MONSTERS IN A LAB.”

They are.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

They’ve made life forms that:

Have no immune system (meaning they only live in controlled labs — for now)

Can regenerate completely from injury

Replicate with no DNA correlation to any tree of life on record

And here’s the kicker:

THEY DON’T DIE.

Not unless they’re programmed to.

And when one coder forgets a bracket?

You’ll feel it.

📓 FINAL ENTRY — READ THIS TWICE

We are not prepared for what’s coming. Because we weren’t built to fight it.

You can’t punch a protein loop. You can’t protest a gene cascade. You can’t cancel a species that’s never needed a name.

And by the time you feel it?

It’s been alive for years. It’s already airborne. It already knows your blood.

Reblog if you know man’s hubris is a terminal disease.

Reblog if you realize: science fiction wasn’t fiction. It was a blueprint.

🧠 Read more dark biological doctrine and real-data mindbreaks at: 👉 https://linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence 🛡️ Blacksite Literature™. No-fucks-given scrolltrap. 🚨 Reminder: If you wouldn’t survive the last century’s diseases, what makes you think you’ll survive next century’s creations?

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Did you see this preview of my comic on Iron Circus Comics’ Failure to Launch BackerKit project page and wonder: "what ARE all those animal skeletons?!?"

Well wonder no more: here's a version with every species labeled--scientific and common names both!