#dire wolves

Please understand this is a drastic failure of scientific reporting. What they have done is impressive science, but they have not brought dire wolves back.

They found a few gene fragments that were in dire wolves and manufactured similar in wolves.

To quote a reddit thread: it's like putting a few words of hamlet in another play and claiming its hamlet.

We have put jellyfish genes in cats to make them glow: those cats are not now jellyfish.

It's impressive to be able to identify and insert the genes like that, but these are not dire wolves and, to be frank, do not even resemble current models of dire wolves.

I want to make this clear. It is an impressive scientific achievement.

But the communication here is near outright fraudulent in my opinion.

I am rather dissappointed and can already feel the numerous convos I'm gonna have to have with random people online about this.

«hunger and obedience»

another one of the Stark children with their direwolves

What they actually did was kind of neat; they copied genes sequenced from dire wolf DNA and inserted them into the grey wolf genome (replacing grey wolf DNA, as they said gray wolves shared a significant percentage of their genome (which isn't saying a TON considering how much the human and chimp genome have in common without being nearly the same animals, but it's better than taking, say, a turtle's genome or something else super unrelated), to create a wolf with genes that dire wolves had.

And while that's not really the same thing as building a dire wolf completely from scratch, so to speak, and it's not really "cloning" them either, it's still pretty cool science, and just like with the woolly mouse, the work (ie, altering/editing multiple genes at once from sequenced DNA of deceased individuals) COULD apply to conservation of actual species (for example, having the ability to widen the genome of remaining breeding individuals of an endangered species, with DNA from deceased individuals). I'm not sure if it IS applying to other species right now (at least not through this company, despite their stated claims to want to), but it is one of their stated goals and it would work.

Also, they're pretty cute

As they were born in October 2024, they now have their own 2,000 acre reserve where Colossal is monitoring them closely. There are two males and one female, but as they've stated they do not have plans to breed them, I'm not sure where the female is being kept in relation to the males, but I suspect she's the solo-wolf pictured, vs the pics of the pair.