I am sure you have heard the news. In broad letters on its title page, Time Magazine presented an article in which they proudly declared that the dire wolf is no longer extinct and the same could be true for many new species to come. A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences, after having already made “woolly mice” based on the genes of woolly mammoths, claims to have created three dire wolf pups based on ancient DNA, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi (more on that particular naming choice later).
This has ruffled a lot of feathers, including mine, in fact so much that it is now bringing this blog back from hibernation. In the wake of this announcement, Time and various other news outlets, as well as social media, have spread some quite blatant misinformation and have not talked nearly enough about the ethical concerns, as well as the questionable conduct of Colossal in how they choose to present, or more accurately, market their projects. Moreover, I think there are many lessons from the past we are forgetting in this hype, for this is not the first questionable attempt at de-extinction and there are some remarkable parallels which bring to mind the cliché adage: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
These are not dire wolves
First, I think it needs to be clarified that what Colossal has produced cannot be called dire wolves by most measures. The three pups they have made are not clones of dire wolves nor do they have any of the original DNA of that species in them. In fact, it is impossible with current technology to clone a long-extinct animal, because how cloning currently works is that the nucleus of a living donor cell is transferred to a host egg cell. While it is possible to sequence the complete genome of extinct animals like the mammoth from permafrost remains, you cannot actually get that DNA to code again without the intact cell-machinery of a living nucleus. Unless some major technological breakthrough is achieved, the only viable way of de-extinction is therefore to take a modern living animal and edit its genes to resemble the extinct counterpart. This is exactly what happened here. As per the Time article, Colossal took the genome of the modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) and made edits to only 14 genes out of 19’000 in order to create something with a few traits which they think resembles the dire wolf, such as larger size, more muscles and, for some strange reason we will get to, white fur. The resulting embryos were then carried out by surrogate dog mothers. If you have been following the Chickenosaurus project of Jack Horner, all of that may sound familiar to you and said project has received similar criticisms as you will read here. But to give Horner credit where credit is due, he never claimed to directly recreate Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor but has always been pretty open about how the project would ultimately just result in a new breed of chicken that looks a bit dinosaury.
The pups are therefore not clones, but imitations. Poor imitations at that. Aenocyon dirus has for a long time been thought to be a unique species of wolf, hence the outdated binomial Canis dirus, whose ancestors supposedly immigrated from Eurasia into North America. It has thus traditionally been depicted as a sort of uber-wolf. This old assumption was mainly based on the morphology of the bones. As of 2021, studies based on the genomes extracted from dire wolf bones, ironically the same data that Colossal should have based their work on, have shown a very different picture, which also has potential implications for the life appearance of the animal. They agree that the dire wolf was not a wolf at all, but instead a basal member of the Canini that lies wholly outside the genus Canis (Perri et al. 2021). In more simple terms, jackals and African wild dogs are more closely related to the grey wolf than Aenocyon is. Their last common ancestor lived as far back as 5.7 million years ago. The similarity of Aenocyon to wolves is merely due to convergent evolution and it likely represents a distinct lineage that evolved endemically in the Americas, similar to (though not directly part of) the cerdocyonines, like the South American maned wolf Chrysocyon, which looks more like a cross of a deer and a fox. In short, what this means is that Colossal’s choice of the grey wolf as a base genome is highly questionable. Most other species of canine would have been just as appropriate and some like jackals and dholes would have likely resulted in more accurate-looking results.The choice of a white fur colour to differentiate the pups from their grey wolf template is also pretty puzzling. Aenocyon dirus is only known from bones, its coloration therefore remains mere guesswork. I have seen Colossal on social media claim that in their genetic research they found white to be the most likely coloration for the species, but they do not seem to have published those findings in any peer-reviewed journal. This is very suspect, because uncovering the coloration of an extinct mammal based on DNA fragments alone would be sure to generate headlines. It generally also does not make sense with what we know about the animal. Yes, Aenocyon lived during the ice ages, but that does not mean it was a permanent tundra dweller living in snowy environments, where white fur is the most advantageous. Fossils of these animals are conspicuously absent from northern latitudes, their northernmost range being southern Canada (Dundas 1999). The most famous locality of the dire wolf are the La Brea Tar Pits and Los Angeles was not a chilly place, even during the Ice Age. Fossils of Aenocyon have even been found as far south as Venezuela and Chile. In general, the animal seems to have preferred environments that resemble the modern American prairie or even the African savannah. Mere logic would therefore dictate that it likely had short fur and more earthy colours to better blend in with the dry vegetation. White, shaggy fur would have made these animals prone to overheating, too conspicuous to successfully sneak upon prey and also would have made them easy targets for other predators, including humans. If Colossal is right, maybe that’s why the dire wolf is extinct… but I think a wholly different aspect than scientific accuracy was chosen in making Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi white, one we will get to later.
This makes the claim of Beth Shapiro, CSO of Colossal Biosciences, that the pups should be considered dire wolves de facto because they share key anatomical traits, all the more dubious. They simply do not resemble what Aenocyon would have likely looked like. Moreover, Shapiro seems to be using a purely morphology-based approach to the definition of species, as per the Time article. This was what biologists used in the eighteenth century, before evolution or extinction was even known, and has long been supplanted by genetic and phylogenetic approaches to species definitions, as well as Ernst Mayr’s classic biological definition of interbreeding populations. Not even paleontologists, who often cannot work with genetic data, use purely morphological criteria to distinguish species anymore, but use complex cladistic computer-modelling and probability to determine if lineages can be considered distinct enough to warrant different names. I would bet money that if the DNA, skeletons or both of Romulus and Remus were fed into such a cladistic program, they would still be recovered as some type of Canis lupus or at least Canis, not Aenocyon. Speaking of Ernst Mayr, it is important to note that the same studies which recovered Aenocyon as a distinct lineage of American canine also found exactly zero evidence that it ever interbred with members of the genus Canis, once true wolves migrated to the Americas (Perri et al. 2021), showing that they were way too distinct to be able to hybridize. Romulus and Remus, however, still sharing 99.93% of their DNA with their grey wolf template, would no doubt still be able to father viable children with a wolf mother.
The story of the Nazi Mock-Aurochs
The idea of de-extinction is not quite as new as people may think. Ever since the infancy of vertebrate paleontology, people have been obsessed with seeing charismatic megafauna in the flesh again, such as when Thomas Jefferson asked Lewis and Clark to look out for any surviving mastodons on their westward expedition. The idea of using genetic engineering specifically to recreate extinct animals also goes farther back than one might expect, though back then it used to be called good, old-fashioned selective breeding. Beginning in the 1920s, the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, living in Weimar Germany, attempted to recreate the extinct aurochs, Bos primigenius, by crossbreeding various types of cattle until they ended up with a breed that they thought looked and behaved sufficiently primitive enough. The original goal was to preserve the memory of the species, because the brothers feared that too many people were mistaking historical mentions of the aurochs with the still-living wisent (the European bison).
Fig. 3: Modern specimens of the Heck cattle. |
With the fall of the Weimar Republic and the takeover of Hitler, the project saw support by the Nazi regime. Lutz Heck appealed to them by proposing that the aurochs could be used as an instrument of their Lebensraum-Politik, as rewilding it into the primordial forests of Eastern Europe would, in their eyes, authentically recreate the original primitive homeland of the Germanic people (Driessen & Lorimer 2016). This was not done out of any ecological interest, but rather because the Nazis dreamt of a scenario where their freetime consisted of recreationally hunting aurochs for sport like their ancestors supposedly did. Hermann Göring took an especial liking to the Heck cattle, seeing the aurochs as a symbol of German Urkraft and in a sense using them as tools of colonization during the conquest of Eastern Europe. He released the first specimens in 1938 in his personal hunting range in the Romincka Forest, which is today in Kaliningrad. The next batch was released in 1941 in the Polish Białowieża Forest, after displacing and killing numerous local villagers in order to expand this nature preserve (Driessen & Lorimer 2016). Further plans were only halted by the collapse of the Eastern Front and the advance of the Soviets.
Today, the Heck cattle survive merely as curiosities in some European zoos and wildlife parks. The few Göring specimens that survived the Red Army were all later killed by Polish farmers, due to being aggressive and dangerous. The only wild populations today are documented in the Netherlands and Latvia, where the animals have trouble surviving, due to still being domestic cattle and therefore not being adapted to cope well with winters and wolves. The Heck cattle project has been described by historians as misguided from the very beginning, even before being retooled by Nazi ambitions. The Heck brothers worked off inaccurate and idiosyncratic assumptions of the aurochs’ life appearance and so all experts today do not deem the Heck cattle an accurate reconstruction of the extinct animal (Van Vuure, 2005). Various southern European domestic breeds, especially Spanish fighting bulls, are seen as being genetically and morphologically closer to the aurochs than the Heck cattle ever were. Both ecologically and scientifically they are therefore close to worthless.
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Fig. 4.: Graphic showing the notable differences between the extinct aurochs (top) and the modern mock recreation of the Heck cattle (bottom). |
Granted, Colossal is obviously not as sinister as the Nazis, because they claim that they want to rewild the dire wolf and various other extinct animals, like the mammoth and thylacine, as a form of ecological restoration and also claim this is paying back nature for the negative impact humans have made. But the results would still look the same, even if their “dire wolves” were 100% accurate to the real thing. If Colossal indeed were to rewild a viable breeding population of their mock wolves into the Americas, they would not magically fill out the ecological niche Aenocyon once occupied. That niche simply does not exist anymore. Its whole ecosystem does not exist anymore. The end of the Pleistocene saw the extinction of 35 genera of mammals alone in North America (Faith & Surovell 2009), most of which were megafauna that the dire wolf relied on for its diet. Without recreating that ecosystem, the dire wolves would instead be forced to compete for the same prey animals as regular wolves and coyotes, negatively impacting the ecology of those two species and their prey. Just like the Heck cattle, they would also come into conflict with farmers, hunters and poachers, quickly leading to their second extinction. In the most likely and optimistic case, however, due to their aforementioned genetic similarity, the Colossal wolves would simply bond and interbreed with populations of regular grey wolves, which in turn means that their genome and phenotype would stop being a distinct entity and just become part of the wider grey wolf gene pool.
Similar problems can be imagined for a variety of other hypothetically rewilded extinct animals. What life would a mammoth herd in modern Siberia or Alaska realistically live now that climate change is destroying the permafrost? What ecological changes would such large and destructive animals create that would bring them into conflict with the local humans? What prospects does a thylacine realistically have in an Australia that is now overrun by dingoes, cane toads and, worst of all, Australians?
As per the Time article, in addition to their de-extinction programs, Colossal is also cloning the extant red wolf in hopes of preserving the species and introducing more genetic variety into the population. This is in theory more defensible, but cloned animals are on average much less healthy than regular-born individuals, so in the end this does not seem nearly as effective as regular wildlife preservation methods (such as those employed in preserving the cheetah), which mainly focus on keeping the habitats of the animals intact and free from disturbance, so that genetic variety can recover on its own. This all opens up the question of why even bother? I have various reasons to believe that ecology is not at the forefront of Colossal’s concerns, despite their claims.
Genetic Engineering and Extinct Animals in the Age of Capitalism
I have purposefully not brought up Jurassic Park until now, because it simply is cliché and not really a comparable situation. The story’s Ingen company was at least honest about the fact that their products could not live in the wild without causing major damage to ecology and human life and therefore had to be restricted to an artificial theme park. Instead, I would like to draw attention to another science fiction novel. Authored by Stephen Baxter in 2002 and simply titled Evolution, the book is a retelling of human evolution from the earliest primates in the Cretaceous all the way until the far future. A little creative project on my Patreon is heavily inspired by it, but also written in opposition to its cynical tone. The frame story Baxter uses is that of Joan Useb, a paleontologist from Kenya, and primatologist Alyce Sigurdardottir, who in the year 2031 are invited to a conference in Rabaul, where scientists of many different fields meet to discuss solutions to climate change as well as societal and ecological collapse. There they meet star geneticist Alison Scott, as well as Scott’s daughter Bex, a genetically enriched designer-child with blue hair and orange eyes. During the course of the conference, the following happens:
Alison Scott was talking to the camera. She was a tall, imposing woman. ‘… My field is in the evolution of development. Evo-devo, in tabloid speak. The goal is to understand how to regrow a lost finger, say. You do that by studying ancestral genes. Put together a bird and a crocodile and you can glimpse the genome of their common ancestor, a pre-dinosaur reptile from around two hundred and fifty million years ago. Even before the end of the twentieth century one group of experimenters were able to “turn on” the growth of teeth in a hen’s beak. The ancient circuits are still there, subverted to other purposes; all you have to do is look for the right molecular switch…’Joan raised her eyebrows. ‘Good grief. You’d think it was her event.’‘The woman’s work is show business,’ Alyce said with cold disapproval. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’With flourish, Alison Scott tapped the box beside her. One wall turned transparent. There was a gasp from the pressing crowd – and, beyond that, a subdued hooting. Scott said ‘Please bear in mind that what you see here is a generic reconstruction, no more. Details such as skin colour and behaviour have essentially had to be invented…’‘My God,’ said Alyce.The creature in the box looked like a chimp, to a first approximation. No more than a metre tall, she was female; her breasts and genitalia were prominent. But she could walk upright. Joan could tell that immediately from the peculiar sideways-on geometry of her hips. However right now she wasn’t walking anywhere. She was cowering in a corner, her long legs jammed up against her chest.Bex said, ‘I told you, Dr. Useb, you don’t have to go scraping for bones in the dust. Now you can meet your ancestors.Despite herself, Joan was fascinated. Yes, she thought: to meet my ancestors, all those hairy grandmothers. That is what my life’s work has really been all about. Alison Scott evidently understands the impulse. But can this poor chimera ever be real? And if not- what were they really like?Bex impulsively grasped Alyce’s hand. ‘And, you see?’ Her crimson eyes were shining. ‘I did say you didn’t have to be upset about the loss of the bonobos.’Alyce sighed. ‘But, child, if we have no room for the chimps, where will we find room for her?’The mock australopithecine, terrified, bared her teeth in a panic grin. (Baxter 2002, p. 285 – 286)
A mock Australopithecus is more outrageous than a mock Aenocyon, but we are seeing today basically the same situation play out in real life. Just like the unfortunate ape, there is no place or chance for the wolf pups to live outside of an artificial environment. This is outright admitted in the Time article: Due to the way they had to be raised, the “dire wolves” and even the cloned red wolves do not actually know how to survive in the wild and are therefore destined to live out their fate in captivity. How the company plans to solve this obvious problem to their rewilding efforts, I have not been able to deduce. The sole reason these organisms exist for now, and maybe forever, is for showmanship. In the story, Alison Scott uses the modified chimpanzee merely to showcase the versatility of her genetic research, with the main purpose being to modify humanity itself into a new species capable of withstanding all of the current troubles (with a sinister hint that she maybe intents to divide our species into castes to stop social unrest, à la Brave New World). Colossal does something similar by proposing genetic de-extinction as an easy solution to all of the current ecological problems we are facing. It is no big deal that the red wolf is critically endangered, we can just clone it back. It is no big deal that the quoll is going extinct due to cane toads, we can just make them resistant to the amphibians’ poison. It is not too dissimilar from tech bros proposing that general AI, libertarianism or Mars colonization will be our saviours, despite all of these also being just pipedreams. The modern world is facing complex problems that cannot be solved with a holy grail, they all require a coordinated group-effort on multiple fronts. Often, private companies are actually opposed to such efforts, because it means they cannot have the monopoly on selling you the solution to the problem that the system they inhabit has caused. A snake oil salesman would rather you buy his homeopathic globuli for your cancer rather than you undergoing surgery.
In my view, it is all just marketing, aimed to generate financial
support from shareholders and a public easily wooed by headlines. Marketing
using living designer organisms. This is especially obvious by Colossal’s social media
presence. Did you know that they have a Reddit account? And that account is the
moderator of r/deextinction? A day ago, said account posted
this image on r/gameofthrones:
There are two ways to frame this story. The most charitable is that Colossal is truly concerned about wildlife preservation and that projects such as the red wolf cloning are the main focus. In this case, all that marketing circus around de-extinction is a way to keep shareholders interested and keep funds flowing into the actually important projects. But this would still be at the ethical expense of creating organisms merely for marketing stunts that can afterwards not live out an authentic life. All in service of a capitalist hellscape that does not see inherent value in ecology.
The more cynical view is that the de-extinction truly is the main (and vain) focus, which makes it even more questionable what the point is, seeing, as we have discussed, that there is no realistic prospect of these animals being successfully reintroduced into the wild. Seeing all the “brand synergy” with Game of Thrones, the obvious appeal the company wants to make to nerd culture and remembering the story of the Heck cattle, one fears more sinister motives. Just like the Nazis wanted a formidable hunting target in form of the aurochs, could you not as easily see Colossal in the near future try to sell their mock dire wolves as exotic pets to rich nerds? You can already imagine the marketing lines: “Get your own Ghost! Feel like a true Stark! Winter is coming!”
They would make fine additions to chickenosaurs, woolly mice, quollacyines, dovedodos and whatever else may be cooked up in the lab that will resemble actual prehistoric life about as much as David Peters reconstructions. Pugs and chihuahuas will look quaint in retrospective, we are maybe about to see the new age of GMO pets as living accessories and commodities shaped solely to chase pop culture and social media trends.
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Related articles:
References:
- Baxter, Stephen: Evolution. A novel, London 2002.
- Driessen, Clemens & Lorimer, Jamie: Back-breeding the aurochs. The Heck brothers, National Socialism and imagined geographies for nonhuman Lebensraum, in: P. Giaccaria and C. Minca (Hrsg.): Hitler’s Geographies. Chicago 2016, p.138-157.
- Dundas, Robert: Quaternary records of the dire wolf, Canis dirus, in North and South America, in: Boreas, 28, p. 375 – 385.
- Faith, Tyler & Surovell, Todd: Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 2009, p. 20641–20645.
- Kluger, Jeffrey: The Return of the Dire Wolf, in: Time Magazine, April 7, 2025.
- Perri, Angela; Mitchell, Kieren; Mouton Alice; et al.: Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage, in: Nature, 591, 2021, p. 87 – 91.
- Van Vuure, Cis: Retracing the Aurochs. History, Morphology and Ecology of an extinct wild Ox, Chicago 2005.
Image sources:
- Fig. 1: National Geographic
- Fig. 2.: Perri et al. 2021.
- Fig. 3.: Wikimedia
- Fig. 4.: Wikimedia
- Fig. 5.: This Reddit post