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I know the current political and economic situation is overwhelming right now and that’s why I always scour the science news for anything I can talk about that will actually brighten your day. And boy, do I have a fun one for this video! Just take a look at these adorable puppies, which are actually de-extincted dire wolves brought back to life thanks to genetic tweaking. Aww, aren’t they adorable? Look at their floofy little faces. So sweet.
TOO BAD THEY’RE FUCKING FAKE AS HELL! These aren’t direwolves, they’re LIARwolves. They suck and I hate them.
Okay, I don’t hate these puppies, per se, I just hate the people who created them, which happens to be the same way I feel about purebred domestic dogs. And for some of the same reasons!
All the fawning articles you’re currently seeing about these puppies come courtesy not of any important science that’s been done, but from a press release put out by a for-profit corporation run by billionaires called Colossal Biosciences. They first started getting press when they claimed that they were going to bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction, back in 2023 in an announcement made at South by Southwest, where all great scientific announcements are made. Like in 2009 when they launched Foursquare. Remember Foursquare? No? Maybe Colossal can sequence its DNA and bring it back to life 10,000 years from now.
Anyway, two years after that announcement, last month Colossal really did bring the woolly mammoth back. Look, here they are! Two woolly mammoths, hanging out on a table together, doing woolly mammoth stuff, like running in a little wheel and nibbling on cheese.
Oh, what’s that? You can plainly tell that those are NOT in fact woolly mammoths? You can clearly see that Colossal just took a completely different species and edited some of their genes to make them “woolly,” but they haven’t got around to doing the “mammoth” part yet? That’s great, I’m glad you clocked all that because it will prepare you for this month’s announcement that they’ve brought back the dire wolf.
Because just like with those woolly “mammoths,” these puppies are in no way “dire wolves.” They are just plain old wolf wolves, who have had their genes edited to look more like the way the general public thinks dire wolves might have looked like, because of Game of Thrones, a made-up fantasy TV show that everyone hates now. And if you think I’m kidding, they literally named one of the wolf puppies “Khaleesi.” Yeah, and you thought it was embarrassing when your cousin named her baby that. And according to one of Colossal’s founders, he didn’t even know dire wolves were real when it was airing. The show ended five years ago, so it basically took him just a few years to go from not knowing an animal existed to supposedly bringing it back from the dead. Sure, sure.
But yes, dire wolves did live, but they went extinct about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. We do have access to their DNA thanks to several fossil pits in the US, which is how scientists recently discovered that, prior to common belief, they were NOT closely related to today’s existing wolves. In fact, they split off about 5.7 million years ago, and the only reason they look similar is probably because of “convergent evolution,” which means that different species can end up looking similar to one another because they experience similar environmental pressures. Like how birds and bats both adapted to fly despite their distant relation, or how everything eventually evolves into a crab if you give it enough time.
In an attempt to hide that 5.7 million year gap between dire wolves and grey wolves, Colossal announces that the two species share 99.5% of their DNA, which sounds impressive until you realize humans share about 99% of their DNA with pigs. So, imagine an alien got his hands on a pig, and edited the DNA to give it a smaller nose, longer rear legs, and no tail. And then he was like, “look everybody, it’s a human! Please give me more venture capital, thank you.” Because in this sci fi dystopia, humans are extinct but there’s still pigs and venture capital.
That’s what they did! As Michael Le Page explains very carefully in New Scientist, Colossal claims they made just 20 edits to the grey wolf DNA, five of which focused on lightening the color of the coat and the other 15 of which “are intended to alter the animals’ size, musculature and ear shape,” which they won’t even know are successful until the puppies grow up. Which I get, considering I was told Indy was probably a German shepherd dog mix and I mean, look at him. The absolute state of him. He’s probably got more rock crab in him than German shepherd, but we didn’t know until he got older.
Anyway, which edits were made, exactly? Well, we don’t know, because as of now, Colossal has not published any actual research on any of this. Everything you are learning comes from their own public relations team, and even the New Yorker points out that they refuse to reveal any details on the genes because it’s “company’s I.P.”
Okay, so they have some gray wolves with lighter coats and maybe slightly bigger bodies. What now? Well, according to Colossal’s website, they will now “return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” So I guess that means they’ve really buried the lede that they also invented a time machine because the dire wolf’s rightful place in the ecosystem is TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO. Like, imagine if that previous alien released the pigman into the Earth of 12,025, which is obviously going to be all water, and so the pigman just rolls out of its cage and promptly drowns. Whoops!
Colossal knows that there is no “rightful place” in the present ecosystem for dire wolves, because even the relatively kind and glowing New Yorker article points out that humans don’t even want WOLVES around. Regular wolves! 15 years ago we had a vice presidential candidate who ran on the platform of how fun it is to shoot wolves from a helicopter! How much are farmers going to love the idea of bigger, prettier wolves killing their livestock?
Hell, we can’t even protect coyotes because people can’t keep their fucking housecats inside. Humanity isn’t exactly extending a warm welcome to large predators right now.
(Post-production edit: check out Bethany Brookshire’s post for more on that topic!)
And that’s why Colossal is also pretending that their stunts will help conserve species that aren’t extinct yet: by learning how to bring these other species back from extinction, we can save future species! This is a bit like the argument over colonizing Mars: which is easier, making a dead and dry and distant planet habitable for humans, or stopping the human activity that is leading to THIS planet becoming uninhabitable for humans? Which is easier: supporting the scientists who are currently successfully engaged in conservation of threatened species, or letting those species die and then bringing them back to life using another related species?
And that’s assuming that the general public, or any researchers outside of Colossal’s corporate structure, has access to their data. Which again, right now, no one does! There’s no peer-reviewed research, only their pinky promise, and they refuse to tell anyone anything of note because of “company IP.” That isn’t how conservation is done, and it’s not how any good science is done.
So sure, let’s all coo over the cute photos, but at the end of the day, you’re not any closer to living out your Game of Thrones fantasy. If that’s what you want, you can get a pet that’s 90% dire wolf at your local animal shelter right now.
