We need to talk about Colossal's 'Dire Wolves'

Have Colossal Biosciences really resurrected the dire wolf? The answer . . . is not that surprising if you know about evolution or genetics.
Written, recorded & produced in 8 hours with a chest infection. New personal record I reckon

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Music: Leaving Home & Big Drumming by Kevin McCloud

[depressedchargersfan]

Honestly, I knew it wasn’t a de-extinction, but I’m still impressed that they were able to do as much as they did

[fishmobsmovietv]

To be fair, the technology used to create these dire wolves have also been used to clone Red Wolves which are now being used to help with genetic rescue amongst the species.

[joshuarosen]

Cute puppies. May not be direwolves but they certainly are adorable.

[adedoyinolufowobi]

As soon as I saw the image, I knew they couldn't be "dire wolves". But the animal I'd like to see the most is the Carolina parakeet.

[zaragozrex]

The "Dire Wolf" just being a regular wolf but with a white coat just for pop culture points made me realize that if we truly were to "bring back" a non-avian dinosaur, it would look like something from Jurassic Park and nobody would bat an eye.

[dimetrodon]

I'm worried about this downplaying the importance of conservation and endangered species since we can "just make more"

Edit: and now the Trump administration is using this as excuse to gut protections for endangered species

[davidfiore]

Trying to bring back extinct dire wolves by cloning when they’re not actually dire wolves themselves? It’s like a late April Fool’s Day joke almost.

[SnubbyDaArtist]

Theres so many animals that went extinct recently they could revive..
Kaua’i Ō’ō would be a decent example, although it went extinct around 30-40 years ago, it would get publicity AND help bring back diversity to the hawaiian archipelago.
(And maybe revive the other extinct or functionally extinct hawaiian avifauna while you’re at it, I mean you’ve got loadsa options!)

[cheallaigh]

grey wolves don't even resemble dire wolves, they're closer in looks to a jackal.

[dillonrs]

It never ceases to amaze me how EVERYONE is an EXPERT on EVERYTHING these days. Even bioengineering. Incredible.

[Zipperface]

The Dire Wolf thing is to grab headlines and bring attention to their technology. In the process of making cool, attention-grabbing, and trendy, they've developed techniques and technologies that they are currently using to bring back genetic diversity for the Red Wolf by taking so-called "ghost wolf" genetics from populations of Coyotes with a high concentration of Red Wolf genetics from when they inter-bred and and putting those with high genetic diversity into embryos to grow 100% pure Red Wolves with the genes of lost lineages.

I'm not really gonna comment on what it would be considered or what the ethics are, but based on what they've stated, it would be the equivalent of genetically modifying a Chimpanzee's genome with the genes we think define humans from chimps. I can't say anything to the varsity of the statement since I'm not a geneticist, but going back to the Chimpanzee analogy, if the result looks human, acts human, and communicates like a human, is it a human, a genetically modified Chimpanzee, or something else entirely?

[mixtheory]

Could call them “grave wolves”
Grave is a synonym to dire, and can be a play on how the company is trying to “bring extinct species back from their graves”

[BearsFanGoomba]

Curious…. They said that the gray wolf genome was like 99.5% the same as Dire Wolf 🤷🏻‍♂️

[raptorblack]

They are quite like Jurassic Park's dinosaurs, not the actual animal, but a physical copy of what people think the actual animal looked like(or awesome-broed). At least they admit that there is not dire wolf DNA in these ones

[albatross]

2:45 bruh we need some vaquita porpoise clones pronto!

[generalspitfire]

Thank you for clearing this up. For a moment, I was thinking they were "dire wolves, " but hearing this definitely puts some of that to rest

[Gemagianni]

That was one of the first things I was thinking when they said was that a normal dog carried these wolves in pregnancy… at least implant it in a wolf

[chadgorosaurus]

They really thought that nobody would notice that they're only recreating the game of thrones dire wolf and not the actual, jackal-like one.

[DiBy-]

Neither real nor fake, although if we were being honest we would more accurately call these frankenwolves.

[JackAaron]

I think there is a deeper discussion to be had on this. In an era where this technology is in use, what is a species? If a dire wolf genome was used as a template, and grey wolf DNA was edited until it was informationally identical to the dire wolf genome, then whatever develops out of that probably is a dire wolf in a meaningful sense. But if only 20 genes were edited with many diverging genes left unchanged, I wouldn't say the dire wolf has truly been resurrected. If the 99% of genes that overlap between the two species remain unchanged from the grey wolf, I'd say it's likely a trivial matter. Those genes would belong to both anyway.