Dire Wolves Are Still Extinct

The media are such suckers for hyperbolic biotech stories. Colossal Laboratories and Bioscience made headlines for supposedly having genetically engineered a return of dire wolves that disappeared about 12,500 or so years ago, which many stories claimed to now be “de-extinct” after three gene-edited pups were born.

Uh, no. The company actually engineered gray wolves to have white fur and (if it works) a larger stature. But despite a similar appearance, gray wolves are not actually close relatives of the extinct species. From the New Scientist story:

Grey wolves and dire wolves were thought to be very closely related based on their physical similarities but a 2021 study of ancient DNA revealed that they last shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. Jackals, African wild dogs and dholes are all more closely related to grey wolves (Canis lupus) than dire wolves are, despite their similar appearances.

Beth Shapiro of Colossal says her team has sequenced the complete genome of the dire wolf and will soon release it to the public. Shapiro could not tell New Scientist how many differences there are but said the two species share 99.5 percent of their DNA. Since the grey wolf genome is around 2.4 million base pairs long, that still leaves room for millions of base-pairs of differences.

The company made just 20 gene edits, with five of those having to do with fur color. That’s still a gray wolf any way you look at it.

So, is this a deception? Let’s call it puffery. The company was careful to acknowledge that the dire wolf is not actually back but that the pups are “functional equivalents.” From the Rolling Stone story:

Shapiro says, people should understand an important detail of the project: It is impossible for the DNA of these new cells to be 100 percent identical to their prehistoric ancestors. “There’s probably millions of differences between gray wolves and dire wolves, and the DNA editing technology is not sufficiently robust that we can make all of those changes simultaneously without causing the cell to melt down,” she says. “Until we can synthesize a whole genome from scratch, we can’t make something that’s 100 percent genetically identical, but it’s also not necessary, because what we’re trying to do is create a functional equivalent of that species that used to be there.”

But “functional equivalent” is not a headline grabber, so much of the media went with the exaggerated version that would get bounteous clicks.

Colossal plans to re-create a woolly mammoth. I suspect that if that happens, it will really be an elephant with good hair.