https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#DNA_evidence Look at this caldogram and text
> The sequences indicate the dire wolf to be a highly divergent lineage which last shared a most recent common ancestor with the wolf-like canines 5.7 million years ago. The study also measured numerous dire wolf and gray wolf skeletal samples that showed their morphologies to be highly similar, which had led to the theory that the dire wolf and the gray wolf had a close evolutionary relationship. The morphological similarity between dire wolves and gray wolves was concluded to be due to convergent evolution. Members of the wolf-like canines are known to hybridize with each other but the study could find no indication of genetic admixture from the five dire wolf samples with extant North American gray wolves and coyotes nor their common ancestor. This finding indicates that the wolf and coyote lineages evolved in isolation from the dire wolf lineage.
There are a lot of extant species that are as closely related as the wolf. Cheating based on phenotype sucks. We want real genetic diversity!
Best case, the female wolves they just just made are suitable mothers for the next round of hybrids, so they converge over time.
This however disagreed with Wikipedia, and said there was some inbreeding. That helps make this less fake.
Anyone can go and read the article themselves and decide if this text is credible.
Be it a pale shadow or not, this is a first milestone down a path I hope we continue on.
Maybe they have unimaginable access to such vast energies that they can capture every photon that ever left earth and effectively reverse the lightcone.
Maybe they can sample the neural state of every lived human with exacting precision and wholly create the history of life on earth down to every single human thought and experience. Every neurotransmitter flux. If you've conquered galaxies and bent physics, perhaps this unimaginable resolution of observation is quite trivial.
Maybe they'll resurrect us. Hopefully into a world palatable for us, not some hellscale dystopia horror/torture simulator the quadrillionaires of the future enjoy putting us through.
Maybe that's you now. Being resimulated.
This is all ludicrous, implausible, science fiction fantasy. But maybe your next waking moment will be meeting the future. Hopefully they have something good in store.
Might*.
Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de...
That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl,
2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and
3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity.
If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead.
Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones!
TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...
I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily predict what will happen if we go back to one.
The 'we' here is the issue. Who is we? The human race do not share complex holistic goals, organisational frameworks, or even aesthetic preferences. It's a miracle cooperation exists at all at transnational scale. The hope that it could serve functional purposes - rather than alternately facilitating the enrichment of the very few, and constraining the worst excesses of that wealth transfer - seems to beg the question, how?
'We' don't truly care about anything, there is no we once the net gets that wide. Don't get me started on 'should', a word that shakes its head in impotence.
I'm from NZ, and we had that event in our recent history. The islands had numerous species of giant birds, but these were wiped out quickly by the first humans who came here, just a few centuries ago. Same everywhere. We've been driving species to extinction for a long time.
What they've created here are not actually dire wolves but a couple of timber wolves with about a dozen edits to 12 million gene pairs and the result is creatures that have phenotypic similarities to dire wolves but not their complete genetic signature.
gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions).
Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...
> At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimpanzees and humans.
There are about 20,000 known protein-coding genes in the human genome [1], so that alone refutes the notion that there are only about 700 differences unique to humans. Besides novel unique and changes in the protein sequences themselves, changes in gene regulation is another obvious source of differences.
See this for a more thorough, and up to date, review
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...
There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that they are.
"nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now.
In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.
Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving an endangered species or restoring one with all of its actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.
The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact.
I personally don't care if they "really" restore an extinct animal or not (perfect clone vs. hairy elephants). Their creations are cool proofs of concept for the genetic engineering tooling that they're creating and captures public/investor imagination much more than more mundane (but monetizable) aspects of the work, like working with massive amounts of data, gene editing tools, etc.
In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.
And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & technology that they can spin off and sell for more mundane purposes.
Over what timescale? They don't seriously engage with this idea at all. It's total lip-service.
As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.
(Never mind, that they never conserved anything)
At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
At worst, it'll be a very crowded zoo
I'd assume that translates to relatively costly ticket prices, right?
Ofc, I'm assuming Homo Economicus run this zoo, that might not be accurate irl
If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.
If Disneyland claimed to be helping fix world problems like biodiversity loss and climate change, that would be worth criticizing as well.
Perhaps they could have a coupon day?
Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This money and research would be better spent preventing the ecosystems from collapsing in the first place.
If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed. But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root causes of that extinction is idiocy.
Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.
Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.
Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.
> American Alsatians were first bred to create a family friendly dog breed that looks like a dire wolf. (The dire wolf is an ancient North American wolf species that became extinct around 13,000 years ago.) This dog has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf, but it is calm and gentle enough to be a great pet. They are an intelligent, loving and gentle family dog [...]
"Has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" is a great phrase, and I think highly relevant to the OP article here and the disagreement I see in the HN comments between the people who think "the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" are self-evident and those who think they're non-existent. :)
It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?
Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:
After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal’s study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome.
20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color, however:
But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem: they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that, when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat.
So the coat color alleles are NOT the dire wolf alleles.
Reading between the lines, I take the reporting to imply that these 20 edits are what Colossus thinks is sufficient (at least for marketing purposes ;-) to recapitulate some of the key phenotypic traits of dire wolves.
Does that make them actually dire wolves? Not in my opinion.
I'd probably describe the genetically engineered pups as "isogenic with parental gray wolf genomes with the addition of 20 allelic edits that recapitulate key aspects of the dire-wolf phenotype" (or something to the effect; Colossus hasn't published anything by which to evaluate their claims).
I don't work on canids, but a quick PubMed search turns up this paper:
Perri AR, Mitchell KJ, et al. Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage. Nature. 2021 Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub 2021 Jan 13. PMID: 33442059.
The analyses in that paper suggests quite a bit deeper divergence between dire wolves and gray wolves than the New Yorker articles implies.
... which begs the question: when you're doing Bene-Gesserit-style eugenics on tortoises to get the perfect specimens, what's the nature of the nature you're trying to preserve?
Humans cannot interact with the natural world without changing it, because it is the nature of life (and human life in particular) to change things. The question isn't how we don't make an impact; it's how do we manage that impact responsibly?
(I have no idea if breeding dire-wolf-alikes with genetic modification is responsible or not. Let me know if they get out of the lab and become an invasive species, I think).
Only the Marketing Dept. (and some gullible-when-it-pays-to-be reporters) think they are Dire Wolves.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250407131025/https://www.newyo...
0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dire-wolves-were-...
And therein lies the problem, they went extinct because their prey went extinct - unless you bring back the mammoths for them to hunt, they're never going to survive in the wild; and are essentially "a wolf with a bigger appetite" to keep captive.