Researchers claim to have revived long-extinct dire wolf species, expert skeptical

Colossal released footage on Monday (April 7), which it said featured "dire wolf" adolescent cubs Romulus and Remus. According to Colossal, some of the dire wolf fossils their team utilised for DNA extraction included a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone. One female puppy, Khaleesi, was also part of the “successfully birthed” cubs, they added. Reuters could not independently verify Colossal's claims, nor the location and date of the footage.

Corey Bradshaw, professor of global ecology at Australia’s Flinders University, was skeptical of Colossal’s claims and the actual practicality of reviving an extinct species like the dire wolf. As Bradshaw explained, it’s practically impossible to modify the entire genomes of animals that have been extinct for thousands of years due to factors like DNA degradation.

“So yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe. And that's probably the best that you're going to get. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified gray wolf? Yes,” Bradshaw told Reuters.

“When you claim all these great big things and then you don't provide the associated evidence, especially in something as controversial as this, that is a massive red flag. It suggests that, well, at best, they've over-exaggerated. At worst, they're lying through their teeth,” he added.

Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021 and claims to be the first biotechnology company to use CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing technology to research species de-extinction. Colossal also said it has recently cloned critically endangered red wolves using the same technology, as well as the hybrid Colossal Woolly Mouse - mice genetically engineered to possess traits of the long-extinct woolly mammoth.

Reuters